Hui-Gen Yang

Direct Observations of the Evolution of Polar Cap Ionization Patches

Patchy Polar Cap Patches of enhanced density plasma in the polar ionosphere (or polar cap patches) disturb radio communications and satellite positioning at high latitudes during magnetospheric storms. Using data from Global Positioning System satellites and a high-frequency radar network, Q.-H. Zhang et al. (p. 1597) analyzed a magnetospheric storm driven by a strong coronal mass ejection from the Sun and followed the evolution and motion of a patch of ionization throughout the polar cap. The localized dayside flow response to the solar disturbance allowed a patch to be stored and grow in the dayside polar cap, and the gaps between patches were controlled by the onset of magnetic reconnection in the magnetospheres tail. Observations of ionospheric perturbations after a solar burst hit Earth show how a patch of ionization formed and evolved. Patches of ionization are common in the polar ionosphere, where their motion and associated density gradients give variable disturbances to high-frequency (HF) radio communications, over-the-horizon radar location errors, and disruption and errors to satellite navigation and communication. Their formation and evolution are poorly understood, particularly under disturbed space weather conditions. We report direct observations of the full evolution of patches during a geomagnetic storm, including formation, polar cap entry, transpolar evolution, polar cap exit, and sunward return flow. Our observations show that modulation of nightside reconnection in the substorm cycle of the magnetosphere helps form the gaps between patches where steady convection would give a “tongue” of ionization (TOI).

Nighttime enhancement of the amplitude of geomagnetic sudden commencements and its dependence on IMF-Bz

We present a statistical study of the diurnal variation of the occurrence frequency of geomagnetic sudden commencements (SCs) observed at Kakioka (geomagnetic latitude, θ = 27.4°). SCs with an H-component amplitude (ΔH) larger than 40 nT occur more frequently in the nighttime than the daytime, while those with smaller amplitudes (ΔH < 39 nT) occur more frequently in the daytime. Three large amplitude SCs (ΔH = 85, 117 and 145 nT at Kakioka) were analyzed in detail. All three exhibited larger amplitudes during the nighttime at all low latitudes except those near the dayside equator. A statistical study reveals that the averaged amplitudes are slightly larger in the daytime at Alibag (θ = 10.2°) but considerably larger in the nighttime at three higherlatitude Japanese stations, Kanoya (θ = 21.9°), Kakioka and Memambetsu (θ = 35.4°). Case studies of two moderate amplitude SCs which occurred at the same UT indicate that nighttime SC amplitudes at low latitudes are slightly (considerably) larger than daytime amplitudes when the interplanetary magnetic field (IMF) points northward (southward). We suggest that the diurnal variation of SC amplitudes can be explained by a combination of field aligned and resultant ionospheric currents produced during the main impulse of SCs.

Hemispheric asymmetry of the structure of dayside auroral oval

A comprehensive analysis of long-term and multispectral auroral observations made in the Arctic and Antarctica demonstrates that the dayside auroral ovals in two hemispheres are both presented in a two-peak structure, namely, the prenoon 09:00 magnetic local time (MLT) and postnoon 15:00 MLT peaks. The two-peak structures of dayside ovals, however, are asymmetric in the two hemispheres; i.e., the postnoon average auroral intensity is more than the prenoon one in the Northern Hemisphere but less in the Southern Hemisphere. The hemispheric asymmetry cannot be accounted for by the effect of the interplanetary magnetic field By component and the seasonal difference of ionospheric conductivities in the two hemispheres, which were used to interpret satellite-observed real-time auroral intensity asymmetries in the two hemispheres in previous studies. We suggest that the hemispheric asymmetry is the combined effect of the prenoon-postnoon variations of the magnetosheath density and local ionospheric conductivity.

An extensive survey of dayside diffuse aurora based on optical observations at Yellow River Station

By using 7 years optical auroral observations obtained at Yellow River Station (magnetic latitude 76.24°N) at Ny-Alesund, Svalbard, we performed the first extensive survey for the dayside diffuse auroras (DDAs) and acquired observational results as follows. (1) The DDAs can be classified into two broad categories, i.e., unstructured and structured DDAs. The unstructured DDAs are mainly distributed in morning and afternoon, but the structured DDAs predominantly occurred around the magnetic local noon (MLN). (2) The unstructured DDAs observed in morning and afternoon present obviously different properties. The afternoon ones are much stable and seldom show pulsating property. (3) The DDAs are more easily observed under geomagnetically quiet times. (4) The structured DDAs mainly show patchy, stripy, and irregular forms and are often pulsating and drifting. The drifting directions are mostly westward (with speed ~5 km/s), but there are cases showing eastward or poleward drifting. (5) The stripy DDAs are exclusively observed near the MLN and, most importantly, their alignments are confirmed to be consistent with the direction of ionospheric convection near the MLN. (6) A new auroral form, called throat aurora, is found to be developed from the stripy DDAs. Based on the observational results and previous studies, we proposed our explanations to the DDAs. We suggest that the unstructured DDAs observed in the morning are extensions of the nightside diffuse aurora to the dayside, but that observed in the afternoon are predominantly caused by proton precipitations. The structured DDAs occurred near the MLN are caused by interactions of cold plasma structures, which are supposed to be originated from the ionospheric outflows or plasmaspheric drainage plumes, with hot electrons from the plasma sheet. We suppose that the cold plasma structures for producing the patchy DDAs are in lumpy and are more likely from the plasmaspheric drainage plumes. The cold plasma structure for producing the stripy DDAs should be in wedge like and is generated by conveying the cold plasmas from lower L-shell toward higher L-shell with magnetospheric convection, and that for producing the irregular DDAs is resulted from deforming the wedge-like structure by disturbance. The throat aurora is supposed to be projection of a newly opened flux of reconnection. In addition, we also found that structured DDAs correspond to structured electron precipitations in the ionosphere, which implies that the cold plasma structures in the magnetosphere are magnetically mapped to the ionosphere and act as a duct for producing the structured DDAs. We argue that we have presented some new observational results about DDA in this paper, which will be useful for fully understanding the DDAs.

Aurora image segmentation by combining patch and texture thresholding

The proportion of aurora to the field-of-view in temporal series of all-sky images is an important index to investigate the evolvement of aurora. To obtain such an index, a crucial phase is to segment the aurora from the background of sky. A new aurora segmentation approach, including a feature extraction method and the segmentation algorithm, is presented in this paper. The proposed feature extraction method, called adaptive local binary patterns (ALBP), selects the frequently occurred patterns to construct the main pattern set, which avoids using the same pattern set to describe different texture structures in traditional local binary patterns. According to the different morphologies and different semantics of aurora, the segmentation algorithm is designed into two parts, texture part segmentation based on ALBP features and patch part segmentation based on modified Otsu method. As it is simple and efficient, our implementation is suitable for large-scale datasets. The experiments exhibited the segmentation effect of the proposed method is satisfactory from human visual aspect and segmentation accuracy.

Comparative study of Geomagnetic Sudden Commencement (SC) between Oersted and ground observations at different local times

Oersted is a low-altitude (638-849 km) polar-orbiting satellite. Using vector magnetic field measurements obtained from Oersted, we identified more than 20 geomagnetic sudden commencement (SC) events on both dayside (0600-1800 MLT) and nightside (1800-0600 MLT). The unique properties reflected by these events have never been reported before. The SCs observed by Oersted in the B // (compressional) component on the nightside had the nearly same waveforms as those observed on the ground in the H (northward) component. We suggest that the SCs observed by Oersted on the nightside were dominantly caused by the enhanced magnetopause currents, which were transmitted by the compressional hydromagnetic waves, and the effects of the ionospheric current (IC) were negligible on the nightside. The SC waveforms observed by Oersted on the dayside were apparently different from those observed on the ground. Near the dayside dip equator (DDE), corresponding to preliminary reverse impulses (PRIs) observed in the ground H component, Oersted always observed positive impulses in the B // component, which suggest that the PRIs at the DDE are generated by westward ICs. On the dayside, corresponding to positive main impulses (MIs) of SCs observed in the ground H component, the Oersted B // component always presented clear decreases, which implies that an eastward IC was excited after the PRI. The generation mechanism for the westward and eastward ICs are discussed according to previously proposed models. On the dayside, we suggest that the waveforms observed both on the ground and at Oersted during the time period of PRI and MI were superposition of the incident compressional waves and the disturbance fields caused by the ICs. The features observed by Oersted just above the ionosphere are significant complementary to our empirical knowledge for SCs.

Polar cap patch transportation beyond the classic scenario

We report the continuous monitoring of a polar cap patch, encompassing its creation and a subsequent evolution that differs from the classic behviour. The patch was formed from the storm enhanced density (SED) plume, by segmentation associated with a subauroral polarization stream (SAPS) generated by a substorm. Its initial anti-sunward motion was halted due to a rapidly changing of interplanetary magnetic field (IMF) conditions from strong southward to strong eastward with weaker northward components and the patch subsequently very slowly evolved behind the duskside of a lobe reverse convection cell in afternoon sectors, associated with high-latitude lobe reconnection, much of it fading rapidly due to an enhancement of the ionization recombination rate. This differs from the classic scenario where polar cap patches are transported across the polar cap along the streamlines of twin-cell convection pattern from day to night. This observation provides us new important insights into patch formation and control by the IMF, which has to be taken into account in F-region transport models and space weather forecasts.

Simultaneous ground-based optical and SuperDARN observations of the shock aurora at MLT noon

Using ground-based high temporal and spatial optical aurora observations, we investigated one fortuitous event to illustrate the direct responses of the fine structure auroral emission to interplanetary shock on 7 January 2005. During the shock impact to the magnetosphere, the Chinese Arctic Yellow River Station (YRS) equipped with all-sky imagers (ASIs) was situated at the magnetic local noon region (~1210 MLT) in the Northern Hemisphere, while the SuperDARN CUTLASS Finland HF radar covering the field of view (FOV) of the ASIs at YRS had fine ionospheric plasma convection measurement. We observed that an intensified red aurora manifesting as a discrete emission band at a higher latitude responds to the shock impact gradually, which results in a distinct broadening of the dayside auroral oval due to the equatorward shifting of its lower latitude boundary after the shock arrival. In contrast, the green diffuse aurora, manifesting as a relatively uniform luminosity structure, reacts immediately to the shock compression, displaying prompt appearance in the southern edge of the FOV and subsequent poleward propagation of its higher latitude boundary. Simultaneously, the CUTLASS Finland radar monitored enhanced backscatter echo power and increased echo number, which coincided with intensified discrete aurora in approximately the same latitudinal region. Doppler velocity measurement showed moving ionospheric irregularities with generally enhanced line-of-sight (LOS) speed, but with prominent sunward flow in the polar cap and antisunward flow in both the eastern and western regions. The SuperDARN global ionospheric convection pattern clearly presented a large-scale plasma flow divided in four circulation cells, with two reversed flow cells nested in the noon sector of the polar cap. These direct observations strongly suggest that the prompt shock compression intensified the wave-particle interaction in the inner magnetosphere and enhanced the lobe magnetic reconnection rate at magnetospheric high latitude.

An integrated aurora image retrieval system: AuroraEye

With the digital all-sky imager (ASI) emergence in aurora research, millions of images are captured annually. However, only a fraction of which can be actually used. To address the problem incurred by low efficient manual processing, an integrated image analysis and retrieval system is developed. For precisely representing aurora image, macroscopic and microscopic features are combined to describe aurora texture. To reduce the feature dimensionality of the huge dataset, a modified local binary pattern (LBP) called ALBP is proposed to depict the microscopic texture, and scale-invariant Gabor and orientation-invariant Gabor are employed to extract the macroscopic texture. A physical property of aurora is inducted as region features to bridge the gap between the low-level visual features and high-level semantic description. The experiments results demonstrate that the ALBP method achieves high classification rate and low computational complexity. The retrieval simulation results show that the developed retrieval system is efficient for huge dataset.

A mechanism to explain the variations of tropopause and tropopause inversion layer in the Arctic region during a sudden stratospheric warming in 2009

The mechanism to explain the variations of tropopause and tropopause inversion layer (TIL) in the Arctic region during a sudden stratospheric warming (SSW) in 2009 was studied with the Modern-Era Retrospective analysis for Research and Applications reanalysis data and GPS/Constellation Observing system for Meteorology, Ionosphere, and Climate (COSMIC) temperature data. During the prominent SSW in 2009, the cyclonic system changed to the anticyclonic system due to the planetary wave with wave number 2 (wave2). The GPS/COSMIC temperature data showed that during the SSW in 2009, the tropopause height in the Arctic decreased accompanied with the tropopause temperature increase and the TIL enhancement. The variations of the tropopause and TIL were larger in higher latitudes. A static stability analysis showed that the variations of the tropopause and TIL were associated with the variations of the residual circulation and the static stability due to the SSW. Larger static stability appeared in the upper stratosphere and moved downward to the narrow region just above the tropopause. The descent of strong downward flow was faster in higher latitudes. The static stability tendency analysis showed that the strong downward residual flow induced the static stability change in the stratosphere and around the tropopause. The strong downwelling in the stratosphere was mainly induced by wave2, which led to the tropopause height and temperature changes due to the adiabatic heating. Around the tropopause, a pair of downwelling above the tropopause and upwelling below the tropopause due to wave2 contributed to the enhancement of static stability in the TIL immediately after the SSW.