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A New Technique for Estimating the Lifetime of Bursts of Electron Precipitation From Sounding Rocket Measurements
Author(s) -
Hecht J. H.,
Clemmons J. H.,
Lessard M. R.,
Kenward D. L.,
Sadler F. B.,
Fritz B. A.,
Evans J. S.,
Lynch K. A.
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
geophysical research letters
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.007
H-Index - 273
eISSN - 1944-8007
pISSN - 0094-8276
DOI - 10.1029/2019gl082894
Subject(s) - sounding rocket , rocket (weapon) , electron precipitation , atmospheric sciences , thermosphere , ionosphere , cusp (singularity) , precipitation , electron temperature , depth sounding , physics , electron , geophysics , brightness , environmental science , computational physics , meteorology , geology , magnetosphere , optics , astronomy , plasma , aerospace engineering , oceanography , geometry , mathematics , quantum mechanics , engineering
At 0735 UT on 13 December 2015, the Rocket Experiment for Neutral Upwelling‐2 experiment launched north toward the auroral cusp region from Andoya, Norway. The instrumented rocket included an electron spectrometer, photometers that measured the auroral redline and greenline, and an instrument that measured ionospheric thermal electron temperature. On the down leg, just south of Svalbard, the rocket entered a region of poleward moving auroral forms that were characterized by narrow structures due to a combination of spatial and temporal variations. A noticeable feature was that the redline to greenline brightness ratio was much smaller than expected. A model is developed that shows that these emissions can be used to estimate the lifetimes of bursty electron precipitation. This model is shown to be consistent with some poleward moving auroral form lifetimes being on the order of 100 ms. The correlation between the precipitation and temperature bursts suggest that some transport occurred.