Energy and Motion of Pulsating Aurora

Imager data were collected over multiple nights at Poker Flat Research Range in Alaska. Two complementary methods were used to analyze these data in an attempt to quantify the energy and motion of pulsating aurora. The first method uses data from a 557.7 nm sensitive imager to identify and track patches of pulsating aurora over time. The intensity of the center of a moving patch over time is then correlated with the intensity series of every other pixel in the image. Overlaying the correlation plot with the original image displays how well each patch is correlated with other patches over time. Correlation analysis may be a proxy for how wave activity is spatially correlated in the magnetosphere. The second method involves aligning three different imagers (557.7, 427.8, and 844.6 nm sensitive imagers, respectively), extracting the three intensity time series from a chosen patch of pulsating aurora, and using known relations to determine the energy flux and characteristic energy of the auroral electrons. The goal of this analysis is to gain insights into the wave-particle interactions in the magnetosphere that cause pulsating aurora. We present a combination of these two methods to extract the energy and flux of moving patches.