The ARIA I Rocket Campaign

Abstract

The Atmospheric Response in Aurora (ARIA) I rocket experiment was designed to measure the energy and momentum forcing of the atmosphere during auroral disturbances and the resultant compositional and dynamical changes. It consisted of one instrumented rocket, three trimethyl aluminum chemical release rockets, and various ground‐based optical instruments. The rockets were launched from Poker Flat Research Range, Alaska, in March 1992. The instrumented payload included a set of eight instruments for measuring various atmospheric and ionospheric quantities. This paper describes the contents of the program and the results of electrodynamic modeling and measurements. A substorm onset occurred approximately 4 hours before launch of the instrumented payload, giving rise to both particle and Joule heating in the vicinity of Poker Flat. By launch time, the substorm was well into recovery. We used optical measurements, electron density measurements from the Langmuir probe instrument, and model results from the Strickland electron transport code to specify latitudinal profiles of the height‐integrated Pedersen conductivity. Comparison with assimilated mapping of ionospheric electrodynamics (AMIE) calculations of the Pedersen conductivities for this event indicated that AMIE located the enhanced auroral conductivity region well. However, the magnitudes of the AMIE conductivities in the enhanced region were considerably less than the measurements due to localized substorm‐related particle precipitation enhancements not accounted for by AMIE. Our conductivity profiles were used in conjunction with electric field values produced by the AMIE routine to examine the atmospheric heating rates associated with the substorm. The latitudinally integrated Joule heating rate was initially less than the particle heating rate, but rapidly increased to its maximum value at the time of the substorm maximum while the particle heating rate peaked prior to substorm maximum. The particle and Joule heating were collocated during the expansion and maximum phase, but as the substorm recovered, the Joule heating moved to higher latitudes, so that by the time of launch, the two heating regions were completely separated by several degrees. The analysis indicates that the rocket was launched directly into the atmospheric region where the maximum heating had occurred.