New paper by Mike Shumko on precipitation

Space is big - like really big, so trying to figure out how everything works can be difficult. Often in space physics, we have issues with collecting data across large energy ranges and locations. Sometimes we get lucky by using two different measurements taken from similar or the same place to get a better idea of how things all work together. That’s the case for this newest paper by Mike Shumko A Strong Correlation Between Relativistic Electron Microbursts and Patchy Aurora. He and his teammates found an event where SAMPEX, a satellite looking at high energy electrons precipitating into the atmosphere, flew over an all-sky camera which infers precipitation of auroral energy electrons.

Now that might not seem all that exciting, but… Typically we assume that the processes that cause lower energy (the ones that create the aurora) and the high energy electron loss are not the same. But here was an event where Mike and his team saw both particle populations (the low and the high energies) being pushed down into the atmosphere simultaneously and in the same location! So either there were two different drivers working on each of these particle populations, or one driver that was causing both energy ranges to be pushed into the atmosphere simultaneously. Unfortunately, there were no observations of the drivers, so more events need to be studied.

While Mike was working on this paper, he also developed a fantastic new python library to load and analyze the all-sky camera data. If you want to check out this or other events, you can find it at https://zenodo.org/record/5483880#.YT-v555KjCU.

Citation

In text form — Shumko, M., Gallardo-Lacourt, B., Halford, A. J., Liang, J., Blum, L. W., Donovan, E., et al. (2021). A strong correlation between relativistic electron microbursts and patchy aurora. Geophysical Research Letters, 48, e2021GL094696. https://doi.org/10.1029/2021GL094696

In Bibtex

@article{https://doi.org/10.1029/2021GL094696,

author = {Shumko, M. and Gallardo-Lacourt, B. and Halford, A. J. and Liang, J. and Blum, L. W. and Donovan, E. and Murphy, K. R. and Spanswick, E.},title = {A Strong Correlation Between Relativistic Electron Microbursts and Patchy Aurora},

journal = {Geophysical Research Letters},

volume = {48},

number = {18},

pages = {e2021GL094696},

keywords = {conjunction, microbursts, pulsating aurora, SAMPEX, THEMIS},

doi = {https://doi.org/10.1029/2021GL094696},

url = {https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1029/2021GL094696},

eprint = {https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1029/2021GL094696},

note = {e2021GL094696 2021GL094696},

year = {2021} }