Spatial drift of SAA over solar cycles 22-24

Near the region where Earth's magnetic field is weakest, energetic particles from the Van Allen radiation belts travel as close as 200 km to Earth's surface. This region, called the South Atlantic Anomaly, is not fixed in geospatial location and varies slowly over in time over many years. An analysis using energetic particle data from multiple sensors onboard SAMPEX will be used to quantify the SAA drift. The sensors onboard SAMPEX collected high quality continuous data for nearly two solar cycles from 1992 to 2012. We present here the results of our analysis and discuss its implications.