Although interplanetary magnetic clouds are due to coronal mass ejections, not all the ejecta found in the interplanetary medium are clouds. In this paper we use Hoeksema’s potential field model of the solar magnetosphere to investigate the characteristics of the large-scale magnetic structures at the site of the solar events associated with 35 interplanetary magnetic clouds. The position of the related large-scale magnetic structures was determined from the location of the near surface solar explosive events (flares and filament eruptions) associated with each cloud, obtained in a previous study. ©1999 American Institute of Physics.