HR: 0800h
AN: SA51B-0246    [Abstracts]
TI: Auroras Now! - Auroral nowcasting service for Hotels in Finnish Lapland and its performance during winter 2003-2004
AU: Kauristie, K
EM: kirsti.kauristie@fmi.fi
AF: Finnish Meteorological Insitute Space Research, P.O.B. 503, Helsinki, FIN-00101 Finland
AU: * M„lkki, A
AF: Finnish Meteorological Insitute Space Research, P.O.B. 503, Helsinki, FIN-00101 Finland
AU: Pulkkinen, A
AF: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Code 692, Greenbelt, MD 20771 United States
AU: Nevanlinna, H
AF: Finnish Meteorological Insitute Space Research, P.O.B. 503, Helsinki, FIN-00101 Finland
AU: Ketola, A
AF: Finnish Meteorological Insitute Space Research, P.O.B. 503, Helsinki, FIN-00101 Finland
AU: Tulkki, V
AF: Finnish Meteorological Insitute Space Research, P.O.B. 503, Helsinki, FIN-00101 Finland
AU: Raita, T
AF: University of Oulu Sodankyl„ Geophysical Observatory, T„htel„ntie 62, Sodankyl„, FIN-99600 Finland
AU: Blanco, A
AF: Finnish Meteorological Institute Aviation and Military Weather Service, Rovaniemi Airport P.O.B. 8178, Rovaniemi, FIN-96101 Finland
AB: European Space Agency is currently supporting 17 Service Development Activities (SDA) within its Space Weather Pilot Project. Auroras Now!, one of the SDAs, has been operated during November 2003 - March 2004 as its pilot season. The service includes a public part freely accessible in Internet (http://aurora.fmi.fi) and a private part visible only to the customers of two hotels in the Finnish Lapland through the hotels' internal TV-systems. The nowcasting system is based on the magnetic recordings of two geophysical observatories, Sodankyl\"a (SOD, MLAT ~64 N) and Nurmij\"arvi (NUR, MLAT ~57 N). The probability of auroral occurrence is continuously characterised with an empirically determined three-level scale. The index is updated once per hour and based on the magnetic field variations recorded at the observatories. During dark hours the near-real time auroral images acquired at SOD are displayed. The hotel service also includes cloudiness predictions for the coming night. During the pilot season the reliability of the three-level magnetic alarm system was weekly evaluated by comparing its prediction with auroral observations by the nearby all-sky camera. Successful hits and failures were scored according to predetermined rules. The highest credit points when it managed to spot auroras in a timely manner and predict their brightness correctly. Maximum penalty points were given when the alarm missed clear bright auroras lasting for more than one hour. In this presentation we analyse the results of the evaluation, present some ideas to further sharpen the procedure, and discuss more generally the correlation between local auroral and magnetic activity.
DE: 2494 Instruments and techniques
DE: 2704 Auroral phenomena (2407)
DE: 0815 Informal education
SC: SPA-Aeronomy [SA]
MN: 2004 AGU Fall Meeting