SM41G-2564
Automated Determination of Electron Density from Electric Field Measurements on the Van Allen Probes Spacecraft
Thursday, 17 December 2015
Poster Hall (Moscone South)
Irina S Zhelavskaya, Organization Not Listed, Washington, DC, United States; UCLA, Los Angeles, CA, United States, Maria Spasojevic, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, United States and Yuri Shprits, University of California Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, United States
Abstract:
In this study we present an algorithm for automatic inference of the electron number density from plasma wave measurement made onboard NASA’s Van Allen Probes mission. It accomplishes this by using feedforward neural networks to automatically infer the upper hybrid resonance frequency, 𝑓𝑢h𝑟, from plasma wave measurement, which is then used to determine the electron number density. In previous missions, the plasma resonance bands were manually identified, and there have been few attempts to do robust, routine automated detection (Kurth et al. [JGR, 2014]). We describe the design and implementation of the algorithm, as well as the resulting electron number density distribution. Resulting densities are compared with the densities obtained by Kurth et al. [JGR, 2014] and also to the empirical plasmasphere and trough density model of Sheeley et al. [JGR, 2001]. The analysis of the conditions, under which densities obtained by the proposed method differ significantly from the model of Sheeley et al. [JGR, 2001], is presented. Finally, we discuss the dependence of the electron number density on magnetic activity (Kp) and magnetic local time.
