Automatic Identification of Auroral Substorms Based on Ultraviolet Spectrographic Imager Aboard Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) Satellite

Abstract

An auroral substorm is an important physical process of energy accumulation and explosive release in the Earth’s magnetosphere, and is an important research object of space environment monitoring and space weather warnings. A westward traveling surge (WTS) is a typical auroral physical process of an auroral substorm. Its static characteristic is auroral folding at the polar boundary of an auroral oval and its dynamic characteristic is the westward motion of auroral folding. According to the static characteristic of a WTS, we defined a set of feature parameters based on the morphology and designed a set of automatic detection and discrimination methods; that is, the WTS was identified by using the extracted features and pattern recognition approaches. This approach was tested by using the aurora data of the ultraviolet auroral spectral imager of the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP) satellite. The results showed that the accuracy rate of automatic recognition was 61.39%~63.61% and the precision rate was 55.52%~57.92%. The experimental results showed that the approach was effective at detecting the typical characteristics of an auroral substorm (WTS).