Magnetic disturbances on the ground, being the images of processes of solar-wind/magnetosphere interaction, can be monitored by comparing time-series of magnetic records on the ground with the space weather parameters. However, a serious drawback of the analysis of ground-based magnetograms is the inevitable variation of the magnetic response due to continual changes of the station location. An ideal, but impossible, solution of this difficulty, that will help to discriminate temporal and spatial variations, would be the deployment of a “stationary” in situ observatory with a fixed position in the solar-magnetospheric coordinate system.

However, the desired result can be obtained with the proposed technique of “virtual magnetograms” (VM). This technique has been implemented for key magnetospheric domains (midnight auroral and dayside cusp regions) as an additional tool for monitoring the response of the geomagnetic field to solar wind and IMF forcing. VM for a fixed reference system is reconstructed by 2D fitting and interpolation of 1-min magnetograms from world-wide distributed magnetic stations. The VMs have been produced for the period since 1995 up to nowadays.

A wide range of space physics studies, such as substorm physics, solar wind-ionosphere interaction, dayside-nightside coupling, etc. will benefit from the introduction of the VMs. The database of calculated VMs for the dayside cusp and midnight auroral regions, as well as simultaneous interplanetary parameters (solar wind electric field Ey) and geomagnetic indices (AE, SYMH indices), are available via the specially designed site for all interested researchers for testing and validation.