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Abstract:
Substorms are an explosive release of stored energy in the magnetosphere that result in many observable signals, such as enhancements in the aurora, energetic particle injections and ground magnetic field perturbations. However, the signatures produced by substorms are not necessarily unique to the phenomenon and may not occur every time. Furthermore, there is often no cross-calibration of substorm identifications. Thus, substorm event lists may miss or misidentify substorms, hindering our understanding of substorms and the development and validation of substorm models. In this study, we use metrics derived from contingency tables to quantify the association between lists of substorms derived from SuperMAG SML/SMU indices (Newell & Gjerloev, 2012; Forsyth et al., 2015; McPherron & Chu, 2017; Borovsky & Yakymenko, 2017), mid-latitude magnetometer data (Chu et al., 2015; McPherron & Chu, 2017), particle injections (Borovsky & Yakymenko, 2017) and auroral enhancements (Frey et al., 2004). Some degree of association is found between all the lists, with the strongest associations between similar techniques applied to SML, as we would expect, followed by similar techniques applied to SML and mid-latitude data. We discuss possible explanations of the levels of association seen from our results as well as their implications for substorm analyses.
