Twitter helps track Northern lights
Project engages citizens in collecting real-time data on the auroras
Evan Kiyoshi French
Northern News Services
Tuesday, May 26, 2015
SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE
Shared a northern lights sighting with the Twitterverse? Then you may have unwittingly contributed to a citizen science project.
The Aurorasaurus website combs Twitter looking for posts describing aurora activity, such as the type above, around the world in real time. The project is funded by the $1 million INSPIRE award given out by the National Science Foundation. - NNSL file photo
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Aurorasaurus gathers both tweets that reference the aurora and sighting reports submitted by citizens through the project's website and app.
Five scientists from the project authored a paper exploring whether Twitter could be used to track aurora activity.
They compared tweets collected from September 2012 to April 2013 with aurora indicators, such as hemispheric power, and found that as the strength of the aurora increased so did the number of posts.
The 140-character messages were also helpful in determining the location, colour and activity level of the aurora being viewed, state the authors of the report, titled Mapping auroral activity on Twitter.
On St. Patrick's Day for instance, a major solar storm lit up the skies - and Twitter.
Aurorasaurus logged more than 35,000 aurora-related tweets and reports from around the world, including some unusual regions such as Germany and Poland.
Registered users of the site receive notifications when lights might be visible in their area. On St. Patty's day 361 alerts were sent out.
Users also get "points" for reporting sightings, verifying tweets and completing learning activities as well as a survey. As users accumulate points they are given difference badges, which, according to the website "identify your status among all Aurorasaurus users."
The team says the real-time data collected by the project can be used to map northern lights activity and test aurora predictions based off ejections of highly charged particles spewed from the sun towards Earth.
The aurora is the result of these particles from the sun colliding with gaseous particles in the Earth's atmosphere. Oxygen molecules produce the commonly seen green hue.
In the long-term, the team hopes the information collected will also bolster understanding of solar storms, which depending on their magnitude, can disrupt or even destroy Earth's communication, navigation, pipeline, electrical and transportation systems.
In 1989, such a storm caused a 12-hour blackout in Quebec and disrupted power grids in numerous other places in North America.
It also produced a light show seen as far south as Florida and Cuba.
Scientists currently struggle to accurately forecast such events because of a lack access to space weather observations.
Using Twitter to gather data on large-scale events is not a new idea. Earlier studies have found the social media site to be helpful in detecting and tracking the evolution of earthquakes and other disasters.
