Chaotic appearance of the AE index

Results are reported from a stochastic analysis of a 5-day time series of the geomagnetic AE index during an active period. The original data, the power spectrum, and the autocorrelation function are shown, and the steps in the analysis are described in detail. It is found that the autocorrelation time scale is about 50 min, giving a correlation dimension (for the construction of a time series of m-dimensional vectors) of 2.4. This result is consistent with either colored-noise or deterministic-chaos magnetosphere models, indicating the need for further investigation.