Auroral activities observed by SNPP VIIRS day/night band during a long period geomagnetic storm event on April 29-30, 2014

The Day/Night Band (DNB) of the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) onboard Suomi-NPP represents a major advancement in night time imaging capabilities. The DNB senses radiance that can span 7 orders of magnitude in one panchromatic (0.5-0.9 μm) reflective solar band and provides imagery of clouds and other Earth features over illumination levels ranging from full sunlight to quarter moon. When the satellite passes through the day-night terminator, the DNB sensor is affected by stray light due to solar illumination on the instrument. With the implementation of stray light correction, stray light-corrected DNB images enable the observation of aurora occurred in the high latitude regions during geomagnetic storms. In this paper, DNB observations of auroral activities are analyzed during a long period (> 20 hours) of geomagnetic storm event occurred on Apr. 29-30, 2014. The storm event has the Bz component of interplanetary magnetic field (IMF) pointing southward for more than 20 hours. During this event, the geomagnetic storm index Dst reached -67 nT and the geomagnetic auroral electrojet (AE) index increased and reached as high as 1200 nT with large amplitude fluctuations. The event occurred during new moon period and DNB observation has minimum moon light contamination. During this event, auroras are observed by DNB for each orbital pass on the night side (~local time 1:30am) in the southern hemisphere. DNB radiance data are processed to identify regions of aurora during each orbital pass. The evolution of aurora is characterized with time series of the poleward and equatorward boundary of aurora, area, peak radiance and total light emission of the aurora in DNB observation. These characteristic parameters are correlated with solar wind and geomagnetic index parameters. It is found that the evolution of total area-integrated radiance of auroral region over the southern hemisphere correlated well with the ground geomagnetic AE index with correlation coefficient = 0.71. DNB observations of aurora help understand the relations among solar wind variation, auroral activities and geomagnetic responses.