A Comparison of Modeled Auroral Boundaries with Observations from Citizen Scientists

Abstract:

Over the past year, the citizen science project Aurorasaurus has collected new, globally-distributed, ground-based observations of the aurora and has integrated them with space-based estimates of auroral activity. A case study of these observations were compared to the OVATION Prime model of aurora, run by the NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC). The observations were comprised of positive and negative sightings directly reported to Aurorasaurus, along with verified tweets, which are positive sightings reported on Twitter and verified by Aurorasaurus users. The observations were collected during March and April 2015, a period spanning three large geomagnetic storms, and covered a wide range of latitudes. The observations demonstrated that, during these events, over 60% of the positive aurora observations (which includes those reported directly to Aurorasaurus and the verified tweets) occurred at latitudes equatorward of the SWPC predicted "view line". New scaling parameters were determined from the relationship of the differences in latitude between the positive observations and the view line, and the maximum probability of visible aurora. Future work testing these scaling parameters and using them in the Aurorasaurus real-time alert system will be presented.