Machine Identification Of Throat Aurora

Throat aurora is an auroral form frequently observed nearby the ionospheric convection throat region.Extending from the equatorward edge of the dayside auroral oval,and thus appears to be a north-south aligned discrete auroral arc.According to the recent research,it is supposed to be projection of the frequent,large scale sunken structure of magnetopause which may be caused by reconnection.Accompanied by the material and energy exchange between solar wind and magnetosphere,this sunken structure may produce nonnegligible space weather effects.Developing accurate and efficient method of throat aurora identification by computer vision technology is significant for related scientific study and real-time monitor.In this study,the throat aurora image dataset has been established by processing all sky aurora images of Yellow River Station from 2003 to 2017.Then the highdimensional feature of aurora image has been learned by the Dense Net.It could identify different throat aurora features and classify it simultaneously,through which the neural network achieves machine identification of throat aurora for the first time.The accuracy of the identification model is up to 96% and it has a good generalization performance.In addition,this article attempts to investigate the relationship between throat aurora and interplanetary magnetic field,solar wind and the geomagnetic index from the perspective of feature engineering.By preprocessing 32 space environment parameters from the OMNI web,the dataset of space environment parameters labeled by throat aurora has been established.Based on the XGBoost,a classifier for real-time identification of the occurrence of throat aurora has been established by taking space environment parameters as input,and the order of importance of each feature was obtained.Comparing with traditional physics research,the highly ranked parameters such as solar wind flow speed consistent with previous study.Furthermore,an inference was produced that the strong connection with the mid-latitude geomagnetic disturbance index may reveal the underlying mechanism within the mid latitude ionosphere that forming the throat aurora.The experiment results and inference could support for further research of physical mechanism of the throat aurora.