LAUSR

This article proposes some traditional and newly developed methods to evaluate the properties of the magnetic cloud (MC) observed on 19 – 22 March 2001. We used physical and mathematical approaches to analyze the time series of solar wind plasma and interplanetary magnetic field data. Two methods that are commonly used to derive the MC properties, the minimum variance analysis and the Grad–Shafranov reconstruction, were applied to derive the properties of the MCs by fitting in situ measurements in the corresponding time intervals, as discussed in previous studies. Other methods developed by us (a travel time analysis of the interplanetary coronal mass ejection, spatio-temporal entropy, nonlinear fluctuation analysis, and wavelet analysis) are used as auxiliary tools to help identify whether the event consists of one or possibly two MCs. Our results suggest that the 19 – 22 March 2001 event was composed by two MCs. Our results agree with those of other researchers who used various fitting methods and identified the solar origin of this event as two CMEs.