Automated Identification of Auroral Luminosity Boundaries Using pyIntensityFeatures

Burrell, Angeline G. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8875-9326; Chisham, Gareth ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1151-5934; Longden, Nicola; Fritz, Bruce ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0588-8558; Zawdie, Kate A.. 2025 Automated Identification of Auroral Luminosity Boundaries Using pyIntensityFeatures. Journal of Geophysical Research: Space Physics, 130 (9), e2025JA034230. 10, pp. 10.1029/2025JA034230

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Text © 2025 Crown copyright. This article is published with the permission of the Controller of HMSO and the King's Printer for Scotland. This article has been contributed to by U.S. Government employees and their work is in the public domain in the USA. JGR Space Physics - 2025 - Burrell - Automated Identification of Auroral Luminosity Boundaries Using pyIntensityFeatures.pdf - Published Version Restricted to NORA staff only until 26 March 2026. Download (1MB) | Request a copy

Abstract/Summary

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

Item Type:	Publication - Article
Digital Object Identifier (DOI):	10.1029/2025JA034230
ISSN:	2169-9380
Additional Keywords:	aurora, python, auroral boundaries, auroral imagers, boundary identification, data processing
Date made live:	26 Sep 2025 13:10 +0 (UTC)
URI:	https://nora.nerc.ac.uk/id/eprint/540294

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