Auroral Power

Instruments on board the NOAA Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite (POES) continually monitor the power flux carried by the protons and electrons that produce aurora in the atmosphere. The NOAA Space Environment Center (SEC) has developed a technique that uses the power flux observations obtained during a single pass of the satellite over a polar region (which takes about 25 minutes) to estimate the total power deposited in an entire polar region by these auroral particles. The power input estimate is converted to an auroral activity index that ranges from 1 to 10.

At the lowest power levels of about 50 Gigawatts, there is always an aurora encircling both the north and south polar regions .Severe magnetic storms (Kp = 9) can often produce aurora with over 600 Gigawatts of power!

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