Large-scale Aspects of Pulsating Aurora: Spatial/Temporal Evolution, Relation to Substorms, and Duration

Details Large-scale Aspects of Pulsating Aurora: Spatial/Temporal Evolution, Relation to Substorms, and Duration Large-scale Aspects of Pulsating Aurora: Spatial/Temporal Evolution, Relation to Substorms, and Duration

Dec 2010

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2010agufmsm21a1888r&link_type=abstract

American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2010, abstract #SM21A-1888

Physics

[2704] Magnetospheric Physics / Auroral Phenomena, [2736] Magnetospheric Physics / Magnetosphere/Ionosphere Interactions, [2790] Magnetospheric Physics / Substorms

Scientific paper

Pulsating aurora is a common phenomenon generally occurring in the aftermath of a substorm, where dim, long-period pulsating patches appear. The purpose of this study is to examine large-scale aspects of pulsating aurora including the temporal/spatial evolution, the latitudinal and longitudinal extent, and the longevity of these events. The data are the currently available full-resolution mosaics from the 20 THEMIS ASI stations, which include dates in February and March in 2008 and 2009 as well as January 2009. The data include 82 nights where only ~40 contain usable data due to cloud cover and other limiting factors. Typically, a pulsating aurora event can continue for several hours often with a large distribution over the array. The maximum visible extent during a night averages 7 hours MLT, with pulsating aurora usually continuing into dawn. More than half of the data (23 nights) presented examples of pulsating auroral persisting before, during, and after substorm onsets occurring both close to, and far from the area of pulsating aurora. These results suggest that rather than being strictly a recovery phase phenomenon, pulsating aurora may be a persistent, long-lived phenomenon occurring from a seed population provided by substorms, as suggested by Akasofu [1977]. This study also suggests that the source region of pulsating aurora drifts or expands westward for post-midnight and eastward for pre-midnight, usually evolving away from magnetic midnight, which has implications for the source mechanism.

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