Angular distribution of the interplanetary magnetic field vector

A bulk of hourly mean data is used to study the angular distributions of th e vector of the interplanetary magnetic field (IMF) at the Earth's orbit be tween 1964 and 1998. It is shown that the Parker model is valid to an accur acy of 20% when the data are averaged over a time interval of more than a d ay. The meridional component of the magnetic field is virtually absent when averaged over a time of more than several hours. When the averaging time i s greater than or equal to several hours, the contribution of different com ponents to the IMF angular spectra becomes independent of the solar cycle, and angular distributions are close to normal ones. The occurrence probabil ity of the radial vector field in the solar minimum epoch is slightly lower for smaller time scales (about several hours).