HELCATS

AUTHORS: Christian Moestl, Peter Boakes, University of Graz, Austria and SRI, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Graz, Austria. Alexey Isavnin, Emilia Kilpua, University of Helsinki, Finland. Reka Winslow, UNH, USA; Brian Anderson, APL, USA; Lydia Philpott, UBC, Canada. Vratislav Krupar, Jonathan Eastwood: Imperial College, London, UK. We sincerely thank the providers of the individual ICME lists: Simon Good, Reka Winslow, Lan Jian and Teresa Nieves-Chinchilla.
Number of events in ICMECAT: 668
ICME observatories: Wind, STEREO-A, STEREO-B, VEX, MESSENGER, ULYSSES
Time range: January 2007 - December 2015.

This is version: 01 of the catalogue, released 2017-02-28. DOI: 10.6084/m9.figshare.4588315.v1. )

The catalogue can be downloaded in several formats (Fixed format ASCII, JSON, VoTable XML).

A new version of the ICMECAT is available at helioforecast.space. This update will be incorporated into the HELCATS table below in due course.

catalogue contains the following columns (by default only a subset are shown above but all will be included when you copy or download the data. Use the Show/hide columns option to display the required selection.

Coordinate system for all spacecraft except Ulysses (which has magnetic fields given in RTN):  SCEQ
           
SpaceCraft Equatorial Coordinates (SCEQ):
	Z is the solar rotation axis.
	X points from the Sun to the spacecraft, projected in the solar equatorial plane. 
	Y completes the right handed triad and points to solar west.
 This system is thus centered on the respective in situ spacecraft. 
 The solar equatorial plane as the reference plane is similar for all spacecraft.
           
Notes: 
(1) For all spacecraft: If there is no sheath region, so the ICME starts immediately with a magnetic obstacle, the ICME_START_TIME is similar to MO_START_TIME.
(2) For all spacecraft the times that are given are: the ICME_START_TIME (defined by shock or elevated magnetic field start), the MO_START_TIME,
    and the MO_END_TIME (MO for magnetic obstacle, defined by elevated field and smooth magnetic field rotations, but also includes (few) complex ejecta).
    Only for Wind the ICME_END_TIME is given extra.
(3) MESSENGER: For ICME events catalogued by Winslow et al. the end time of the ICME is used for MO_END_TIME (not ICME_END_TIME). 
    Caution: after 2011 March 18 when MESSENGER is in orbit around Mercury the times are sometimes not exact because MESSENGER may pass through the Mercury magnetosphere at the time of CME impacts.
(4) MESSENGER and VEX: For events cataloged by Simon Good ICME_START_TIME has been added by V. Krupar (Imperial College) and C. Moestl (Graz).
(5) For the calculation of the parameters at MESSENGER during the orbit around Mercury, all data points inside the the outer boundaries of the bowshock have been removed.
    (according to a list thankfully provided by R. Winslow, B. Anderson, and L. Philpott).
(6) For MVA to be applied to the MO interval, up to 25% of the MO data points may be NaN. Otherwise MVA results are set to NaN.
    This is relevant to MESSENGER in orbit around Mercury and VEX at Venus, where the ICME observation in the solar wind sometimes contains too few data points.
(7) Calculation of the MO parameters at VEX is done with an approximate removal of the induced magnetosphere, with a modified equation
    according to the one in the discussion of Zhang et al. 2008 (doi: 10.1016/j.pss.2007.09.012), with a constant of 3.5 instead of 2.14/2.364,
    in order to account for a larger bowshock distance during solar maximum than studied in this paper.