Automated Identification of Auroral Luminosity Boundaries Using pyIntensityFeatures

Abstract

Imagers that observe optical or ultraviolet emissions from the atmosphere are commonly used to identify and study ionospheric phenomena. These phenomena include the auroral oval, equatorial plasma bubbles, and traveling ionospheric disturbances. One difficulty with using imager observations is accurately and automatically retrieving locations of interest from these images. This article presents an automated method designed to identify auroral luminosity boundaries from space-based imager data. This method was originally developed for the Imager for Magnetopause-to-Aurora Global Exploration (IMAGE) observations, but has been further adapted for use with a wider range of observations. This article discusses the updated boundary detection method, and demonstrates the process on two different satellite data sets. The updated detection method has been made publicly accessible through a new Python package, pyIntensityFeatures.