Robust techniques to improve high quality triangulations of contemporaneous citizen science observations of STEVE
Abstract
Recently, citizen science observations initiated research on the aurora-like phenomenon STEVE linked to unusually high ion drift velocities and temperatures in the subauroral ion drift. Since then, our understanding of STEVE has grown and is still growing using data from traditional sources and the citizen science community. This work presents a multi-case analysis for STEVEs observed in Canada, Australia and New Zealand utilizing techniques to extract robust data for timing, synchronization and tracking of specific optical features from independent ad-hoc citizen science observations. Identification of sufficiently contemporaneous STEVE observations is often challenging due to a lack of precise clocks thus limiting the amount of accessible robust data. When precise timing information is lacking techniques for the reconstruction of the recording time and to synchronize recordings must often be applied on a case-specific basis. Techniques allowing us to overcome this limitation help towards a better understanding of optical features associated with STEVE. Such features can be extremely rare, small and dynamic thus fixed professional ground and satellite based instruments are severely challenged as well. We apply techniques for the identification of the height of short lived features in STEVE based on their position relative to background stars, transient celestial phenomena like meteors or satellite transits, and distant landmarks. The large amount of data already compiled by the citizen science community forms a broad database that has so far only been used to a limited extent. On the one hand citizen science data need to be documented and processed in a way that is easily accessible for effective use. On the other hand we further need case-specific adaptable techniques repeatedly applied in case studies to demonstrate their performance. This work concentrates on the second part.
- Publication:
-
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2021
- Bibcode:
- 2021AGUFMSA35F1957H