Document Type
Article
Publication Date
11-2018
Abstract
There has been an exciting recent development in auroral research associated with the discovery of a new subauroral phenomenon called STEVE (Strong Thermal Emission Velocity Enhancement). Although STEVE has been documented by amateur night sky watchers for decades, it is as yet an unidentified upper atmosphere phenomenon. Observed first by amateur auroral photographers, STEVE appears as a narrow luminous structure across the night sky over thousands of kilometers in the east‐west direction. In this paper, we present the first statistical analysis of the properties of 28 STEVE events identified using Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms (THEMIS) all‐sky imager and the Redline Emission Geospace Observatory (REGO) database. We find that STEVE occurs about 1 hr after substorm onset at the end of a prolonged expansion phase. On average, the AL index magnitude is larger and the expansion phase has a longer duration for STEVE events compared to subauroral ion drifts or substorms. The average duration for STEVE is about 1 hr, and its latitudinal width is ~20 km, which corresponds to ~¼ of the width of narrow auroral structures like streamers. STEVE typically has an equatorward displacement from its initial location of about 50 km and a longitudinal extent of 2,145 km.
DOI
10.1029/2018JA025368
Source Publication
Journal of Geophysical Research: Space Physics
Recommended Citation
Gallardo‐Lacourt, B., et al. (2018). A Statistical Analysis of STEVE. Journal of Geophysical Research: Space Physics, 123(11), 9893–9905. https://doi.org/10.1029/2018JA025368
Comments
This record sources the open access CHORUS-furnished accepted manuscript (post-print) version of the article. A 12-month embargo was observed for this posting in accordance with the publisher and the research funding body.
The publisher version of record is a subscription-access article, appearing as cited below in volume 123 of Journal of Geophysical Research: Space Physics, hosted at Wiley (on behalf of the Ameican Geophysical Union). Readers outside of AFIT will need to access the article through their own digital subscription to that periodical. AFIT readers can reach the final article through AFIT Off-Campus Access.