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Hello everyone,
I am Josh, based in Alberta, Canada. By trade I am an instrumentation technician working in the energy sector, so I spend my days around sensors, calibration, and systems that need to be accurate in the field, not just on paper. My interest in space physics grew out of a much less technical starting point, a group chat on facebook amongst friends.
A few years ago I joined a community of local aurora chasers, nicknamed the High Rollers, who spent nights refreshing space weather charts trying to work out whether the aurora would show. I found the available tools frustrating. Most of them displayed raw data or a single index value and left the interpretation to the user, with no real attempt to forecast conditions ahead of time. My instrumentation background made me want to dig into why, so I started pulling together the underlying measurements myself.
That side project became Aurora Admin, a forecasting platform that now analyzes over 50 live measurements tied to solar wind and geomagnetic activity, including parameters like solar wind speed, solar wind density, and the Bz component of the interplanetary magnetic field, and estimates the likelihood of visible aurora at a given location before it happens. Rather than reporting a single number and leaving people to guess what it means, the goal is to give a clearer forward looking answer. Subscribers can also get an SMS alert when conditions look favorable, which is useful for anyone observing from a remote location with a weak cell signal.
Building this has meant a lot of self directed learning, working through papers on geomagnetic indices, solar wind coupling, and substorm behavior, and figuring out how to translate that into something that runs reliably in near real time. That is actually the main reason I am here. I want to learn from people who understand the physics at a deeper level than I do, and I am sure there are gaps or oversimplifications in my current approach that this community would catch quickly.
Some background on my current understanding, for context and so people can correct me where needed.
Aurora visibility depends heavily on the orientation of the interplanetary magnetic field, particularly the Bz component. A southward Bz makes reconnection with Earth's magnetosphere more efficient, which tends to enhance geomagnetic activity, but I have learned this is a tendency rather than a strict requirement, and aurora activity can still occur without a strongly negative Bz.
Hemispheric power, derived from polar orbiting satellite observations, gives a live snapshot of the energy being deposited into the upper atmosphere at high latitudes, which is a different measurement in kind from the solar wind parameters measured further upstream at the L1 point by satellites like DSCOVR and ACE, and soon IMAP and SWFO-L1. I try to be careful not to conflate the two in how I explain things publicly, since I think that is a common source of confusion in more casual aurora chasing communities.
Thanks for reading,Josh
I am Josh, based in Alberta, Canada. By trade I am an instrumentation technician working in the energy sector, so I spend my days around sensors, calibration, and systems that need to be accurate in the field, not just on paper. My interest in space physics grew out of a much less technical starting point, a group chat on facebook amongst friends.
A few years ago I joined a community of local aurora chasers, nicknamed the High Rollers, who spent nights refreshing space weather charts trying to work out whether the aurora would show. I found the available tools frustrating. Most of them displayed raw data or a single index value and left the interpretation to the user, with no real attempt to forecast conditions ahead of time. My instrumentation background made me want to dig into why, so I started pulling together the underlying measurements myself.
That side project became Aurora Admin, a forecasting platform that now analyzes over 50 live measurements tied to solar wind and geomagnetic activity, including parameters like solar wind speed, solar wind density, and the Bz component of the interplanetary magnetic field, and estimates the likelihood of visible aurora at a given location before it happens. Rather than reporting a single number and leaving people to guess what it means, the goal is to give a clearer forward looking answer. Subscribers can also get an SMS alert when conditions look favorable, which is useful for anyone observing from a remote location with a weak cell signal.
Building this has meant a lot of self directed learning, working through papers on geomagnetic indices, solar wind coupling, and substorm behavior, and figuring out how to translate that into something that runs reliably in near real time. That is actually the main reason I am here. I want to learn from people who understand the physics at a deeper level than I do, and I am sure there are gaps or oversimplifications in my current approach that this community would catch quickly.
Some background on my current understanding, for context and so people can correct me where needed.
Aurora visibility depends heavily on the orientation of the interplanetary magnetic field, particularly the Bz component. A southward Bz makes reconnection with Earth's magnetosphere more efficient, which tends to enhance geomagnetic activity, but I have learned this is a tendency rather than a strict requirement, and aurora activity can still occur without a strongly negative Bz.
Hemispheric power, derived from polar orbiting satellite observations, gives a live snapshot of the energy being deposited into the upper atmosphere at high latitudes, which is a different measurement in kind from the solar wind parameters measured further upstream at the L1 point by satellites like DSCOVR and ACE, and soon IMAP and SWFO-L1. I try to be careful not to conflate the two in how I explain things publicly, since I think that is a common source of confusion in more casual aurora chasing communities.
Thanks for reading,Josh