Auroral Image Model to Test Energy Inversion Methods

Ground-based all-sky cameras have been used to observe aurora in a variety of techniques. One technique inverts auroral energetics from filtered camera observations of aurora, described by Grubbs et al 2018. Understanding that all measurements have errors, a camera model was created to quantify the errors in the auroral energetics inversion for a different conditions.

The camera model has three parts: (1) a three-dimensional lattice of sky locations, (2) a three-dimensional lattice of camera look locations, and (3) a lookup table connecting the two lattices so an image can be rendered.

After the grids and lookup table are constructed, the sky grid can be populated with emissions, and when an image is rendered they will show up on the camera sensor. Any method of grid population can be used (e.g arbitrary profiles, observed profiles, empirical profiles, constant emission rates). The GLobal airglOW model (GLOW) is an electron transport model that gives volume emission rates based on topside electron energetics. As the camera model was constructed to test a technique for optical inversion into energetics, GLOW is an appropriate choice for the sky grid emission population here. Details of the model construction and example output will be presented in this poster.