Aurorasaurus: Crowdsourced Citizen Space Weather Science

We have created Aurorasaurus, a website, a mobile application and a scientific tool that allows a community of users to better predict sightings of the aurora borealis. Aurorasuarus combines limited space weather science data,... [ view full abstract ]

We have created Aurorasaurus, a website, a mobile application and a scientific tool that allows a community of users to better predict sightings of the aurora borealis. Aurorasuarus combines limited space weather science data, participant sightings and the analysis of social media data into a better prediction engine. This then serves to alert interested parties as to nearby sightings.

During the testing of our prototype, we found that the Kp index, a key measure of auroral activity, correlates strongly with the number of aurora-related tweets. This suggests that volunteered Twitter data is a valid indicator of real-world events. The years around 2014 are the latest solar maximum recurring on an eleven-year solar cycle. Now is the time when aurora is more likely over populated areas, and this is the first solar maximum with social media, an unprecedented opportunity to engage the public, the scientific community, and the media.

Space weather scientists have only coarse means to predict where the aurora will occur. However, a network of observers on the ground can provide ground truth, which could enable nowcasts. We anticipate an order of magnitude increase in accurate knowledge of where and when the aurora are visible by augmenting existing observations and models with real-time ground truth. Combined with data from Earth-based and satellite observatories, this allows Aurorasaurus to offer near real-time predictions of auroral activity in both text and map form, likely with much greater accuracy and timeliness than the current state of the art.

User observations of the aurora—collected from Twitter as well as an entry form offered on the website itself—are displayed on a map as pins. We augment this web implementation with a mobile application, in order to make Aurorasaurus more fully available in the field, where its services are most useful.