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From Satellites: IMAGE FUV Archive

The Imager for Magnetosphere-to-Aurora; Global Exploration (IMAGE) watches the belts of high-energy particles orbiting Earth, and the polar regions for signs of energy input into the Earth space environment. This second data set shows how bright the polar auroral oval is in real time. The images are updated every 5 minutes. In the pictures from the satellite, the Earth changes its size and orientation as the spacecraft orbits once every 13.5 hours. It is closest to the South Pole and you get a huge zoom-in on the aurora over Antarctica that fills the screen. Then the satellite moves to position high above the North Pole and you see a far-away picture of Earth's disk that is smaller than the image box.

Click on the left-hand link that says 'overview plots'. This will open up a page titled 'Index of /image/wic_summary'

The auroral oval images are in folders identified by the year and month. For example, 2000_05/ means all the data available for May 2000. The current plots are located in the folder for the current year and month. Example 2003_01/ is the January 2003 data. If you open this folder you will see the following list:

Click on the first link 'wic 2003 10 00.gif' to open the following image:

Click on the third link to open wic 2003 11 00.gif

The top of each panel gives the Day-of-Year (in this case '11') and the date (Jan 11). Each image tile is numbered by its Universal Time (UT). You will note that there are discontinuities in the time because the data is not taken unless the satellite is viewing the polar regions. Data while the satellite is leaving these regions and passing over the equator are not provided in these archive images, but you can see this motion in the real-time images if you are curious. It is easy to pick out the times when the satellite was over Antarctica because the auroral oval fills the entire window since the satellite is only 1000 kilometers above the ground and nearly passing through the auroral altitudes! When the satellite is over the Arctic, we see a nice round image of Earth in the window and can often make out the auroral oval.

To quantify what you are seeing over the Arctic, here is a series of auroral images that are typical of what you may see over the North Pole region.

The image on the far left shows a barely visible partial-oval and this intensity would be classified as Level 1. The middle image shows a slightly brighter oval and this is Level 2 on our scale. The far right image is a typical, very bright auroral oval which we will call Level 3. On the day you are observing, compare the Northern Oval intensity with these three examples and find the number that most closely matches what you are seeing. Note, a single auroral 'storm' actually passes through a series of changes that can range from Level 1 to Level 3. Select the image above that comes the closest to describing the auroral oval you see in the data at its brightest level.

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