Temporal and Spatial Evolutions of a Large Sunspot Groupand Great Auroral Storms around the Carrington Event in 1859

Metadata
Show full item recordAuthor/Creator
Date
2019-08-29Type of Work
33 pagesText
journal articles
Citation of Original Publication
Hayakawa, Hisashi; Ebihara, Yusuke; Willis, David M.; Toriumi, Shin; Iju, Tomoya; Hattori, Kentaro; Wild, Matthew N.; Oliveira, Denny M.; Ermolli, Ilaria; Ribeiro, José R.; Correia, Ana P.; Ribeiro, Ana I.; Knipp, Delores J.; Temporal and Spatial Evolutions of a Large Sunspot Groupand Great Auroral Storms around the Carrington Event in 1859; American Geophysical Union (2019); https://doi.org/10.1029/2019SW002269Rights
This item is likely protected under Title 17 of the U.S. Copyright Law. Unless on a Creative Commons license, for uses protected by Copyright Law, contact the copyright holder or the author.©2019 American Geophysical Union. All Rights Reserved.
Access to this item will begin on 2020-02-29
Subjects
sunspotaurora
magnetic storm
Carrington event
extreme space weather event
solar‐terrestrial relationship
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 (ICMEs) from a large and complex active region (AR) 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 spatial evolution. Sunspot drawings by Schwabe, Secchi, and Carrington describe the position and morphology of the source AR 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 mid to low magnetic latitudes (MLATs). The reconstructed time series is compared with magnetic measurements and shows the correspondence between low 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.