Locating the polar cap boundary of postnoon sector from observations of 630.0 nm auroral emission at Zhongshan Station

Abstract

We studied the ground observations of 630.0 nm auroral emission at Zhongshan Station to determine the polar cap boundary with the latitudinal profile of emission intensity. The open-closed field time boundary is assumed to lie at the boundary between polar rain and plasma sheet precipitation. We assume that nonprecipitation-dependent sources of 630.0 nm emission cause a spatially uniform luminosity in the polar cap and that auroral zone luminosity is also spatially uniform. Therefore we determine the location of the polar cap boundary of postnoon sector from the auroral emission data each time by finding the best fit of the observations to a step function in latitude and we produce a time series of the location of the polar cap boundary. The average error of the practice in the paper is less than 0.8 degree.