Aurora Detection from Nighttime Lights for Earth and Space Science Applications

The OVATION Prime aurora forecast model was initialized with the solar wind parameters corresponding to the period of the onset of the geomagnetic storm, March 17th and 18th, 2015. Global maps were produced in ASCII format in 15-min cadence. These maps are in geographic projection with a data resolution of 1⁰ x 1⁰. The model output represents percent probability of aurora occurrence. The files are converted to geotiff format. "ovation_tif.tar" contains these geotiffs.

The Day/Night band on the VIIRS instrument onboard the Suomi NPP satellite was used to derive a binary aurora mask for each 6 minute granule for Marth 17th and 18th, 2015. These geotiffs are in "aurora_mask.tar". This data was compared with the ovation forecast data for the case study in the paper.