AE指数的可靠性研究

Auroral electrojet index (AE) are usually used to quantitatively describe the activity of the geomagnetic field in the polar region. AE is a means to identify the level of a substorm as well. The auroral electrojet indices (AU, AL, and AE) have served well for more than four decades as measures of magnetospheric substorm activity. However, as substorm studies have progressed considerably during the past several years, the accuracy of the present electrojet indices have become an important issue. Thus it is fortunate for us to reexamine and evaluate the accuracy of the present electrojet indices and improve them if necessary. For a better use of the present indices and for future improvement we examine the limitations of the auroral electrojet indices as an accurate quantitative measure of the auroral electrojets and magnetospheric substorms. Some of the limitations arise from the data availability and also from the present simplified scheme in deriving them, but some of them originate in the definition themselves. In the present paper, we analyze the characteristics of aurora, ionospheric current system and the AE index. It is noted that for the pseudo-breakup events the variations of AE ( > 500 nT) clearly show the sudden increase and slow decrease phases. However, aurora does not expand to poleward or equatorward, and the ionospheric currents presents the features of the magnetic convection. We mainly focus on investigating what time the AE could be used to identify the subtorm.