Idea Description: My proposed research idea is to fly a geo-tagged, filtered video camera for imaging the northern lights in real-time and to display the resulting images on the Aurorasaurus platform.
Aurorasaurus is an emerging project for citizen scientists to experience the extremes of space
weather for the current solar maximum, the first with social media. The northern lights are
dynamic, widespread, and very hard to predict. The Aurorasaurus project aims to use citizen
science, social media, and nowcasting to make a big improvement in predicting the visibility of
the northern lights for the public by encouraging people to report whether they can see aurora or
not. The reports are displayed on an online real-time map along with critical weather information
and coarse predictions from NOAA. We hypothesize that near real-time images from the
International Space Station (ISS) can be used as an additional data source for quantitative
improvements in space weather forecasting and understanding of auroral phenomena, as well
as motivating improved citizen science participation in this project.
To vote for this project go to this link:
http://iframe.wizehive.com/voting/view/52321da9-23f0-4d23-949c-789e0a91afa5/0/1543857/0
