ssj_auroral_boundary

Identify boundaries of the aurora with Defense Meteorology Satellite Program (DMSP) electron precipitation.

How to cite

• Cite the Zenodo DOI (above) for the code
• Cite the paper (below) for the algorithm

Algorithm

This code implements the auroral boundary identification technique described in:

Kilcommons, L. M., Redmon, R. J., & Knipp, D. J. (2017). A New DMSP Magnetometer & Auroral Boundary Dataset and Estimates of Field Aligned Currents in Dynamic Auroral Boundary Coordinates. Journal of Geophysical Research: Space Physics, 2016JA023342. https://doi.org/10.1002/2016JA023342

I really just want some boundary data

The auroral boundaries (as daily CSV files) for F16,F17 and F18 2010 - 2014 are on Zenodo. Please cite the following DOI if you use the dataset in a publication, as well as citing the paper above.

Installation

Tested Operating Systems

• Ubuntu Linux (14.04 and 18.04)
• MacOS (Sierra, High Sierra)

Tested Python Versions

• 2.7 (Anaconda2)
• 3.6 (Anaconda)
• 3.8 (Anaconda)

Other Software Required

There are a few tools used by this library that can't be installed as part of the main install script (setup.py).

1. NASA CDF library This software expects the DMSP data it uses to be packaged as NASA Common Data Format (CDF) files. This library is required to read those files. An additional Python package (Spacepy) provides the python interface.

2. Geospacepy This is a small python package which provides plotting routines and datetime handling.

Clone the github repo

git clone https://github.com/lkilcommons/ssj_auroral_boundary.git

Run the installer

cd ssj_auroral_boundary
python setup.py install

HELP!

If something went wrong or you've found a bug or incompatability please file an issue (above).