2 PROTON AND ELECTRON AURORA OVER EISCAT: OPTICAL SIGNATURE AND ASSOCIATED IONOSPHERIC PERTURBATIONS

• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Norway; Tromsø; EISCAT
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.546.3986; http://www.sp.ph.ic.ac.uk/~mgaland/galand_et_al_proc_2003.pdf

For moderately magnetically disturbed conditions, the EISCAT radar site near Tromsø, Norway, is located on the equatorial edge of the afternoon auroral oval for several hours, where energetic protons are a dominant particle energy source. A unique signature of proton precipitation is the Doppler-shifted H emissions. An imaging Echelle spectrograph designed for high spectral resolution studies of selected features located in the visible spectrum (including Hα and Hβ) was deployed to identify and characterize proton precipitation at EISCAT during two winter-long campaigns in 2001-2002 and 2002-2003. Information on the overall auroral activity and on the cloud cover is provided by a large field-of-view conventional imaging spectrograph. We discuss a comprehensive set of combined optical, radar, and particle observations from these campaigns. Our ability to identify the type of precipitating energetic particles and to infer the ionospheric response is estimated from this dataset. 1.