Detecting the Auroral Oval through CSES-01 Electric Field Measurements in the Ionosphere

Abstract

We present the results of a systematic study of the ionospheric electric field in the Auroral Oval (AO) region in the southern hemisphere. We exploit one year of electric field measurements taken by the Electric Field Detector (EFD) on board the Chinese Seismo-Electromagnetic Satellite-01 (CSES-01), flying at around 500 km altitude in a sun-synchronous orbit. We exploit the high temporal resolution of the EFD to devise a new technique for the detection of CSES-01 crossing of the AO using electric field measurements only. This new technique combines a Median-Weighted Local Variance Measure with Fast Iterative Filtering to automatically isolate high levels of electromagnetic activity caused by, e.g., particle precipitation and Field Aligned Currents (FACs) at auroral latitudes. We validate this new method against other standard proxies, such as the single-FAC product from the Swarm mission and the auroral radiance emission measured by the Special Sensor Ultraviolet Spectrographic Imager (SSUSI) units on board the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) constellation. Furthermore, we identify ∼3000 orbits (out of a dataset of ∼10,000) where CSES-01 crosses the AO boundary under conditions of high geomagnetic activity. This dataset represents the first step in the systematic study of the auroral electric field, with many potential applications to space weather, thanks to the large amount of continuous observations of the ionosphere by CSES-01 and the forthcoming CSES-02 mission.