HR: 1340h
AN: SM13A-0309    [Abstracts]
TI: Tomographic Reconstruction of Plasmasphere Density via Latitude Variation Model Parameter Recovery
AU: * Wang, C
EM: cuwang@cs.uah.edu
AF: Univ. of Alabama in Huntsville, UAH Computer Science, TH N 300, Huntsville, AL 35899 United States
AU: Newman, T S
EM: tnewman@cs.uah.edu
AF: Univ. of Alabama in Huntsville, UAH Computer Science, TH N 300, Huntsville, AL 35899 United States
AU: Gallagher, D L
EM: Dennis.L.Gallagher@nasa.gov
AF: Marshall Space Flight Center, NSSTC 320 Sparkman Dr., Huntsville, AL 35805 United States
AB: A new method for reconstructing the density of plasma throughout the terrestrial plasmasphere is introduced. The method is a tomographic approach that utilizes a series of NASA IMAGE Extreme Ultra Violet (EUV) images collected over a short time span. The reconstruction recovers positional densities through a robust fitting process that determines parameters of a latitudinally varying model of the plasma density distribution. This nonlinear model, proposed by Huang et. al. (2004), is based on observation in IMAGE RPI data and requires determination of 5 parameters for each magnetic meridian plane. The fitting process uses Levenberg-Marquardt based nonlinear least squares to determine the set of parameters based on the series of image views, and from these parameters, the plasmaspheric plasma distribution is then estimated. Results on clean synthetic data suggest a recovery error of less than 1%. Tests on real EUV data suggest about a 5% error in recovery. The appearance characteristics of recovered plasma distributions also are visually well-correlated with real EUV data.
DE: 0520 Data analysis: algorithms and implementation
DE: 2768 Plasmasphere
DE: 2799 General or miscellaneous
SC: SPA-Magnetospheric Physics [SM]
MN: Fall Meeting 2005