We present a new characterization of partially coherent electric and magnetic wave vector fields.This characterization is based on the 36 auto/cross correlations of the 3+3 complex Cartesian components of the electric and magnetic wave fields and is particularly suited for analyzing electromagnetic wave data on board spacecraft. Data from spacecraft based electromagnetic wave instruments are usually processed as data arrays. These data arrays however do not have a physical interpretation in themselves; they are simply a convenient storage format. In contrast, the characterization proposed here contains exactly the same information but are in the form of manifestly covariant space-time tensors. We call this data format the Canonical Electromagnetic Observables (CEO) since they correspond to unique physical observables. Some of them are already known, such as energy density, Poynting flux, stress tensor, etc, while others should be relevant in future space research. As an example we use this formalism to analyze data from a chorus emission in the mid-latitude magnetosphere, as recorded by the STAFF-SA instrument on board the Cluster-II spacecraft.
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