NSF Award
2400363
This collaborative project aims to determine the characteristic features in all-sky images that correspond to distinct meso-scale auroral forms, including previously unclassified forms, to improve our understanding of multi-scale ionospheric electrodynamics. Aurora is one of the most visually captivating, yet scientifically complicated, processes in space weather. Since auroral forms can significantly perturb the upper atmosphere, which is important for satellite operations and telecommunications, it is important to achieve a more complete understanding of their behavior. Meso-scale auroral forms are known to introduce as much energy as large-scale processes to the Ionosphere-Thermosphere system’s energy budget, causing density and temperature variations, altering the conductivity profiles, and causing ground magnetic perturbations. The increased capabilities and convenience of computer vision techniques can find similarities and differences in large visual data sets more systematically than the human eye. This award will investigate meso-scale auroral forms, striving to discover new morphologies, that will propel our understanding of how M-I-T systems couple. The team will leverage the high accuracy provided by self-/semi-supervised algorithms to exhaustively scan millions of all-sky images to find morphologically distinct representations of auroral forms. The team will use visual auroral representations for K-12 education and public outreach activities. This award will support graduate and undergraduate students and an early-career woman PI. In addition, this award supports research conducted in EPSCoR states.<br/><br/>This project will use data from the Poker Flat Incoherent Scatter Radar, the optical digital all-sky camera images, and ground-based magnetometers, which are all supported by NSF. The data will be used to find and characterize distinct auroral forms by self-/semi-supervised algorithms, and to generate three distinct databases for the space physics community. The efforts entail the creation of a Space Weather Almanac to be distributed as a part of the UAF Space Weather UnderGround (SWUG) program led by the PI. The Space Weather Almanac will be an online record of observed auroral forms by high school students. Used in combination with measurements from the semi-professional magnetometer kits distributed by the UAF-SWUG program, the space weather Almanac will demonstrate the geomagnetic effects of different auroral forms identified by students and demystify the invisible Space Weather phenomena. The science questions to be addressed are 1) How many morphologically distinct meso-scale auroral forms are there based on optical investigations? 2) What are the electrodynamic properties of morphologically distinct meso-scale auroral forms, i.e. electric field, average energy, energy flux, conductance, overhead currents, etc.? and 3) What are the occurrence sites, rates, and sequences of morphologically distinct meso-scale auroral forms during geomagnetically active periods? The project will curate and disseminate three data sets for meso-scale auroral forms: i. Optically distinct morphology clusters, ii. electrodynamic properties, iii. occurrence rate, site, and sequences. These data sets will provide a powerful resource for the community enabling more rigorous statistical analysis and event-based studies. <br/><br/>This project is co-funded by the Magnetospheric Physics Program and the Aeronomy Program.<br/><br/>This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
