Temporal and Spatial Evolutions of a Large Sunspot Group and Great Auroral Storms Around the Carrington Event in 1859
Abstract
The Carrington event is considered to be one of the most extreme space weather events in observational history within a series of magnetic storms caused by extreme interplanetary coronal mass ejections from a large and complex active region that emerged on the solar disk. In this article, we study the temporal and spatial evolutions of the source sunspot active region and visual aurorae and compare this storm with other extreme space weather events on the basis of their auroral spatial evolution. Sunspot drawings by Schwabe, Secchi, and Carrington describe the position and morphology of the source active region at that time. Visual auroral reports from the Russian Empire, Iberia, Ireland, Oceania, and Japan fill the spatial gap of auroral visibility and revise the time series of auroral visibility in middle to low magnetic latitudes. The reconstructed time series is compared with magnetic measurements and shows the correspondence between low‐latitude to mid‐latitude aurorae and the phase of magnetic storms. The spatial evolution of the auroral oval is compared with those of other extreme space weather events in 1872, 1909, 1921, and 1989 as well as their storm intensity and contextualizes the Carrington event, as one of the most extreme space weather events, but likely not unique.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Pub Defense Publication
- Publication Date
- Nov 01, 2019
- Source ID
- 10.1029/2019sw002269
Entities
People
- Ana Isabel Ribeiro
- Ana P. Correia
- D. M. Willis
- Delores Knipp
- Denny M. Oliveira
- Hisashi Hayakawa
- Ilaria Ermolli
- José R. Ribeiro
- Kentaro Hattori
- M. Wild
- Shin Toriumi
- Tomoya Iju
- Yusuke Ebihara
Organizations
- Air Force Office of Scientific Research
- Institute of Space and Astronautical Science
- Kyoto University
- National Aeronautics and Space Administration
- National Astronomical Observatory of Japan
- National Center for Atmospheric Research
- National Institute for Astrophysics
- Osaka University
- Rutherford Appleton Laboratory
- University of Colorado Boulder
- University of Maryland
- University of Porto
- University of Warwick