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Abstract
AbstractWe present the first large‐scale comparison of the spatial distribution of field‐aligned currents as measured by the Active Magnetosphere and Planetary Electrodynamics Response Experiment, with the location and brightness of the average auroral oval, determined from the Imager for Magnetopause‐to‐Aurora Global Exploration far ultraviolet instrument. These distributions are compared under the same interplanetary magnetic field magnitude and clock angle conditions. The field‐aligned currents and auroral oval drop to lower latitudes, as the interplanetary magnetic field becomes both increasingly stronger in magnitude and increasingly southward. We find that the region 2 currents are more closely aligned with the distribution of auroral UV emission, whether that be in the discrete auroral zone about dusk or in the postmidnight diffuse aurora sector. The lack of coincidence between the region 1 field‐aligned currents with the auroral oval in the dusk sector is contrary to expectation.
Highlights
The traditional viewpoint is that upward field-aligned currents (FACs, known as Birkeland currents) are coincident with discrete aurora [Elphic et al, 1998]
We present the first large-scale comparison of the spatial distribution of field-aligned currents as measured by the Active Magnetosphere and Planetary Electrodynamics Response Experiment, with the location and brightness of the average auroral oval, determined from the Imager for Magnetopause-to-Aurora Global Exploration far ultraviolet instrument
Each panel is plotted with noon to the top, on a magnetic local time (MLT) and magnetic colatitude grid
Summary
The traditional viewpoint is that upward field-aligned currents (FACs, known as Birkeland currents) are coincident with discrete aurora [Elphic et al, 1998]. We compare the location and brightness of the auroral oval, obtained from the Imager for Magnetopause-to-Aurora Global Exploration (IMAGE) far ultraviolet (FUV) cameras, with the distribution of FACs, obtained from the Active Magnetosphere and Planetary Electrodynamics Response Experiment (AMPERE) data set. There are currently no high-altitude, polar orbit imagers of the auroral zone, so the data sets we use were not obtained simultaneously. By binning the data under the same solar wind and geophysical conditions we are able to compare the distributions of the auroral oval with that of the FACs. This paper presents the first large-scale statistical comparison of the auroral oval UV emission, for both the electron and proton aurora, with the distribution of the Birkeland currents
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