Magnetic field draping occurs when the magnetic field lines frozen in a plasma flow wrap around a body or plasma environment. The draping of the interplanetary magnetic field (IMF) around the Earth’s magnetosphere has been confirmed in the early days of space exploration. However, its global and three-dimensional structure is known from modeling only, mostly numerical. Here, this structure in the dayside of the Earth’s magnetosheath is determined as a function of the upstream IMF orientation purely from in-situ spacecraft observations. We show the draping structure can be organized in three regimes depending on how radial the upstream IMF is. Quantitative analysis demonstrates how the draping pattern results from the magnetic field being frozen in the magnetosheath flow, deflected around the magnetopause. The role of the flow is emphasized by a comparison of the draping structure to that predicted to a magnetostatic draping.

We present an automatic classification method of the three near-Earth regions, the magnetosphere, the magnetosheath and the solar wind from their in-situ data measurement by multiple spacecraft. Based on gradient boosting classifier, this very simple and very fast method outperforms the detection routines based on manually-set thresholds. The method is used to identify 15 062 magnetopause crossings and 17 227 bow shock crossings in the data of 11 different spacecraft of the THEMIS, ARTEMIS, Cluster, MMS and Double Star missions and for a total of 83 cumulated years. These multi-mission catalogs are easily reproducible, can be automatically enlarged with additional data and their elaboration paves the way for future massive statistical analysis of near-Earth boundaries.

The Earth magnetopause is the boundary between the magnetosphere and the shocked solar wind. Its location and shape are primarily determined by the properties of the solar wind and interplanetary magnetic field (IMF) but the nature of the control parameters and to what extent they impact the stand-off distance, the flaring, and the symmetries, on the dayside and night side, is still not well known. We present a large statistical study of the magnetopause location and shape based a multi-mission magnetopause database, cumulating 17 230 crossings on 17 different spacecraft, from the dayside to lunar nightside distances. The IMF clock angle itself (all amplitudes combined) is fount not to impact the stand-off distance, nor does the cone angle. However, the magnetopause is found to move Earthward as the IMF gets stronger and more southward. All upstream conditions combined, it is found that the function used at the root of several analytical models still holds at lunar distances. The meridional flaring is found to depend on the seasonal tilt conditions, being larger in the summer hemisphere. The flaring is also found to depend on the IMF clock angle. Meridional flaring increases as the IMF turns south and is then larger than the equatorial flaring. The equatorial flaring barely changes or weakly increases as the IMF turns northward, and is larger than the meridional flaring for northward conditions. The study pave the way for the elaboration of a new analytical empirical expression magnetopause surface model.

In a companion statistical study, we showed that the expression of the magnetopause surface as a power law of an elliptic function of the zenith angle θ holds at lunar distances, that the flaring of the magnetopause surface is influenced by the Interplanetary Magnetic Field (IMF) By component and that the IMF Bx component had no influence on the stand-off distance. As a follow-up to these statistical results, this paper presents a new empirical analytical asymmetric and non-indented model of the magnetopause location and shape. This model is obtained from fitting of 15 349 magnetopause crossings using 17 different spacecraft and is parametrized by the upstream solar wind dynamic and magnetic pressures, the IMF clock angle and the Earth dipole tilt angle. The constructed model provides a more accurate prediction of the magnetopause surface location than current Magnetopause surface models, especially on the night side of the magnetosphere.

The shape and location of the magnetopause current sheet in the near-cusp region is still a debated question. Over time, several observations led to contradictory conclusions regarding the presence of an indentation of the magnetopause in that region. As a result several empirical models consider the surface is indented in that region, while some others do not. To tackle this issue, we fit a total of 17 230 magnetopause crossings to various indented and non-indented analytical models. The results show that while all models describe the magnetopause position and shape equivalently far from the cusp region, the non-indented version over-estimate the radial position of the near-cusp magnetopause. Among indented models, we show that the one designed from MHD simulations fits well the near-cusp magnetopause location, while the other underestimate its position probably because their design was possibly based on magnetopause crossing catalogues that contain cusp inner boundary crossings.