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Qualitative Data from Citizen Scientists Enhances AMGeO鈥檚 Auroras Research

Tomoko Matuso

In response to solar storms, electrons and ions are produced in the Earth鈥檚 magnetosphere that collide with the upper atmosphere鈥檚 oxygen and nitrogen. This collision causes a release of energy in the form of a magnificent glow of light - an aurora. Only visible in high-latitude regions, auroras have long been perceived as quite mysterious. One such aurora, seen near Alberta, Canada, as shown in the accompanying image, is called the Strong Thermal Emission Velocity Enhancement (STEVE) and was discovered by a group of citizen scientists via their collaboration with the Aurorasaurus project.

When the AMGeO (Assimilative Mapping of Geospace Observations) project team at the University of Colorado at Boulder caught wind of STEVE and how much qualitative citizen science data the Aurorasaurus project had collected, they decided to create an informal collaboration to see how they could work together to better understand these magical phenomena.

鈥淥ne of the goals of our open source data science tool, called AMGeO, is to make it easier for geospace community members to easily fuse data obtained from an array of diverse instrumentation,鈥 said Tomoko Matsuo, AMGeO principal investigator and assistant professor at the 精品SM在线影片鈥檚 Smead Aerospace Engineering Sciences Department. 鈥淲hile we successfully use multiple types of heterogeneous data in AMGeO, thanks to machine learning techniques for examining various aspects of the coupling of the Earth鈥檚 magnetosphere and atmosphere, including auroras, it is very challenging to make use of auroral sighting reports by citizen scientists.鈥