Date: 30 November, 2018

Dataset Title: RAINBOW All Sky Imager data

Dataset Creators: Jun Liang, Zihan Wang

Dataset Contact: Zihan Wang, wzihan@umich.edu

Funding: National Science Foundation (NSF)

Research Overview: 
The aim of the research to study the temporal evolution of the Sub-Auroral Polarizations Streams (SAPS) with multiple instruments. Aurora images are important to identify the electrodynamics in the high latitude ionosphere. Data used in this research were collected and provided by Dr. Jun Liang at University of Calgary, and analyzed by Zihan Wang for the article accompanying this deposit. The data was collected from all sky imagers (ASI) located in Saskatoon, Canada.

Methods: The ASIs take images and movies of the aurora by looking up at the sky from horizon to horizon above each ASI location. This is accomplished by using a "fish-eye" lens. The cameras take images and movies, gathering all the visible light from the aurora that they can. The cameras are located in a small housing with a dome on top. The electronics and small computers operating the instrument and recording the data are generally in an adjacent building or in a separate environmentally controlled box. In these boxes the electronics, computer, and camera are heated/cooled in order to keep the ASIs operational during the cold winters/hot summers. The figures were then saved as sav file by IDL. 

Instrument and/or Software specifications: See .sav file

File Inventory: 
- saskrainbow01.sav contains the rgb channels from ASI. It can be opened using IDL. Original IDL version is 8.7.
- saskasiskymap.gm5 is a binary file containing the sky map of the ASI. It shows the geographic location of the figure pixels.
- aurora_diff.pro is the procedure to recover the data from saskrainbow01.sav and make plots.
- draw_colorbar.pro is the procedure to add a colorbar to the plot.
- mlon_smp_towang.pro and rebinsmpkeo_towang.pro can together make keogram plots. Run mlon_smp_towang.pro first and then rebinsmpkeo_towang.pro.

Related publication(s):
Wang, Z., Zou, S., Shepherd, S. G., Liang, J., Gjerloev, J.W., Wygant, J.R., Ruohoniemi, J.M. and Kunduri, B., 2018, Multi-instrument observations of Meso-Scale enhancement of Sub-Auroral Polarization Stream associated with an injection. Journal of Geophysical Research: Space Physics.

Use and Access: 
This data set is made available under a Creative Commons Public Domain license (CC0 1.0).

Data citation: Liang J., Wang, Z. (2018). RAINBOW All Sky Imager data [Data set]. University of Michigan Deep Blue Data Repository. https://doi.org/10.7302/Z2BK19KG