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OVATION: A multi-institutional effort to define the
position (and ultimately the intensity) of the auroral oval using multiple
data sets cross-calibrated to a single standard. Data from the DMSP
satellites, from NASA's Polar UVI imager, and from the University of Alaska,
Fairbanks Meridian Scanning Photometer are all incorporated. Only the latter
is currently available real-time. The size and position of the auroral oval
can be plotted for any time from December 1983 to present. |
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GOES derived nowcast Kp and b2i: When the GOES
satellites are on the nightside of the Earth, the extent to which the Earth's
magnetic field has been stretched from its natural dipole inclination into a
long magnetotail is measured by the GOES magnetometers. The more stretched
the Earth's magnetic field, the more active is the state of the magnetosphere.
GOES magnetometer data is available real-time from NOAA's space data center
and from this data, the present values of Kp and b2i can be derived.
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Current Forecasts of Kp and Dst:
As technology advances, space weather prediction has become increasingly
important to many human activities, e.g., communications, navigation
systems, satellites, power grid, space travel, etc. Kp and Dst are two of
the most common indices used to indicate the severity of disturbances in
near-Earth space. For the past few years, the ACE spacecraft, located at
the L1 point, has been reliably providing solar wind measurements up to
approximately 45-60 minutes in advance of its arrival at Earth. Kp and Dst
models based on solar wind input can use ACE observations to make short-term
forecasts of these two indices.
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Solar Wind- Magnetosphere Coupling Function | New findings indicate that the aurora and other near-Earth
space weather are driven by the rate at which the Earth's and Sun's magnetic
fields connect, or merge, and not by the solar wind's electric field as was
previously assumed. The merging occurs at a spot between the Earth and Sun,
roughly 40,000 miles above the planet's surface, and appears fundamental to
the circulation of particles and magnetic fields throughout near-Earth space.
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| Stories | Space Physics Research Stories (Dual Scientific and Plain
English Presentations)
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| Data Products | Available DMSP Particle Data Products, which include
spectrograms, dayside and nightside crossing identifications,
auroral ovals plots, geomagnetic contour plots, Arc probability
maps, DMSP satellite tracking plots, data files, and some source
code.
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| Substorm Movies | Substorm movies (MPEG format) created from Polar UVI data.
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| Links | Some links to other sites concerned with the aurora and
magnetospheric physics.
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| Bibliographies | Bibliographies of DMSP and Polar UVI Publications.
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| Publications | Papers that have been published.
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