VIIRS DNB images of the aurora

VIDEO DESCRIPTION:

Play, download and edit the free video VIIRS DNB images of the aurora.

The movie shows the near real-time VIIRS DNB images of the Suomi-NPP and NOAA 20 satellites, processed to highlight the aurora. For each frame, the relevant 6-minute observation interval of VIIRS data is added, and after 90 minutes, old data is removed, which results in the moving swaths along the orbits.  

The white areas in the VIIRS data at the top are dayside data, which are oversaturated in the colour map, which was tuned to highlight only the aurora. A different tuning for the dayside would bring out the dayside Earth surface and clouds, but that's another project. 

Note that the observations do not contain information on the colour of the actual visible aurora, they just convey the brightness. 

The orange line represents the civil twilight terminator (day/night boundary). The blue ovals are lines of 60 and 80 degrees geomagnetic latitude. The aurora is visible between these latitudes, and roughly aligned with the shape of these ovals. Other signals are from city lights stray sunlight reaching the imager, especially in the Southern Hemisphere.

Also shown for context are the Hp30 index and upstream Interplanetary Magnetic Field. The Hp30 index, from GFZ-Potsdam, is a high-cadence version of the Kp index, designed to represent the planetary-scale level of disturbance in the geomagnetic field, derived from mid-latitude magnetometers. The Interplanetary Magnetic Field is real-time data provided by NOAA/SWPC, presumably from the DSCOVR satellite. This indicates the magnetic field conditions in the solar wind, about 35 minutes upstream of the magnetosphere, and is a major factor driving the geomagnetic disturbances.

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