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2666085 
Journal Article 
Imaging of Aurora to Estimate the Energy and Flux of Electron Precipitation 
Lanchester, B; Gustavsson, B 
2012 
Yes 
Geophysical Monographs Book Series
ISSN: 0065-8448 
Geophysical Monograph Series 
197 
171-182 
WOS:000320090100014 
The aurora is fascinatingly rich in structure (down to scale sizes of tens of meters across the magnetic field), with fast motions and change of color. Methods developed over the past several decades have used spectral information, with modeling of the auroral upper atmosphere, to study the changes in energy input of the precipitating electrons and the dependence on composition, in particular atomic oxygen variations. Important insight about the physics of auroral phenomena is obtained with these methods not only in the 1-D region of the field-aligned beam but in a larger 3-D region around the magnetic zenith. This chapter reviews and describes the most important details of (forward) modeling of the aurora and demonstrates the power and robustness of the latest methods. These methods combine emission rate ratios with modeling to estimate the energy of the primary precipitating particle distributions. Important results using such methods with measurements from the multispectral imager Auroral Structure and Kinetics are described as examples of the methods outlined.