Reply [to “Comment on ‘New findings about auroras confirm importance of ionosphere in space weather’”]

I thank Hargreaves for raising several interesting points. First, the comment states that instead of writing that riometer absorption events are more frequent in winter than summer, I should have written that they are more intense in winter than summer. Hargreaves is correct. In fact the same might be true of intense electron acceleration events seen in particle data (that is, the data show that there are more intense events in winter, but do not necessarily imply that events selected at a low threshold are not symmetric). Since it is agreed that absorption events are pronouncedly more intense in winter, inescapably a threshold selecting the most intense events would produce a seasonal asymmetry in frequency of occurrence of intense events, with more such in winter.