Remote determination of auroral energy characteristics during substorm activity

Abstract

Ultraviolet auroral images from the Ultraviolet Imager (UVI) onboard the POLAR satellite can be used as quantitative remote diagnostics of the auroral regions, yielding estimates of incident energy characteristics, compositional changes, and other higher order data products. Here incident energy estimates derived from UVI are compared with in situ measurements of the same parameters from an overflight by the DMSP F12 satellite coincident with the UVI image times during substorm activity occurring on May 19, 1996. This event was simultaneously observed by WIND, GEOTAIL, INTERBALL, DMSP and NOAA spacecraft as well as by POLAR.