Substorm: Ionospheric flow structures associated with auroral beading at substorm auroral onset
Out of all my publications this is probably my favorite one, probably because the topic came to me by accident.
In this paper we combined THEMIS All-Sky Imagers (ASI) that take pictures of the aurora over north America every 3 seconds; and SuperDARN radars working on a very high resolution of 6 seconds, which is comparable to the frequency of the cameras. In this paper we identified for the very first time the flow structures associated with substorm onset beading (Donovan et al., 2008), which are considered the signature of the instability that give rise to the substorm onset (the fantastic brightening and sudden expansion in the auroral oval).
We observed a clockwise mesoscale plasma flow sourounding each ionospheric substorm bead, which is consistent with an upward Field-aligned-current (FAC) that corresponds to the bead itself. Yo can find the whole article in the link below:
