Periodicities of polar cap patches

Abstract

A highly sensitive all‐sky electron multiplier charge‐coupled device airglow imager has been operative in Longyearbyen, Norway since October 2011. The imager captures 630.0 nm all‐sky images with an exposure time of 4 s, which is about 10 times shorter than that achieved by conventional cooled CCD imagers. This allows us to visualize the structure of polar cap patches without blurring effects and better estimate their periodicities. We present, as one of the first results from the imager, an event of successive appearance of patches on the night of 21 December 2011. A time series of the optical intensity at zenith showed modulations having two distinguished periods, one at 40 min and the other at 5–12 min. One possible explanation is that such a coexistence of two different periodicities is a manifestation of simultaneous occurrence of patch generation processes on the 40 min periodicity was created by large‐scale reconfiguration of the dayside convection pattern while the 5–12 min modulations were closely associated with mechanisms driven by pulsed reconnection on the dayside magnetopause. Such a combined effect of multiple patch generation processes may play a role in structuring patches; thus, it would be of particular importance for evaluating the space weather effects in the trans‐ionospheric communications environment in the polar cap.