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In response to solar storms, electrons and ions are produced in the Earth’s magnetosphere that collide with the upper atmosphere’s oxygen and nitrogen. This collision causes a release of energy in the form of a magnificent glow of light - an aurora. Only visible in high-latitude regions, auroras have long been perceived as quite mysterious. One such aurora, seen near Alberta, Canada, as shown in the accompanying image, is called the Strong Thermal Emission Velocity Enhancement (STEVE) and was discovered by a group of citizen scientists via their collaboration with the Aurorasaurus project.

When the AMGeO (Assimilative Mapping of Geospace Observations) project team at the University of Colorado at Boulder caught wind of STEVE and how much qualitative citizen science data the Aurorasaurus project had collected, they decided to create an informal collaboration to see how they could work together to better understand these magical phenomena.

“One of the goals of our open source data science tool, called AMGeO, is to make it easier for geospace community members to easily fuse data obtained from an array of diverse instrumentation,” said Tomoko Matsuo, AMGeO principal investigator and assistant professor at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Smead Aerospace Engineering Sciences Department. “While we successfully use multiple types of heterogeneous data in AMGeO, thanks to machine learning techniques for examining various aspects of the coupling of the Earth’s magnetosphere and atmosphere, including auroras, it is very challenging to make use of auroral sighting reports by citizen scientists.”