Thomas Immel's .html Page


Welcome. This is a page of the ancient variety called a "web page"
. I am maintaining it infrequently and you should consider it preserved for history.

You might proceed directly to the Ionospheric Connection Explorer website. ICON is a new NASA mission for understanding of the coupling of the atmosphere to space for which I am the Principal Investigator. We're really excited about this great opportunity that will give us a completely new view of space!

Our student satellite CINEMA is on orbit, and we're bringing it up to speed. Here are a couple articles on it:

Here are some older things that may interest you.

Dayglow 

  • This presentation shows the effect of the Bastille Day flare on Earth's  FUV emissions. This work has been published in JGR (Immel et al., JGR, 2003), and you are welcome to view the original manuscript here.
  • A look at the limb in Southern Hemisphere perigee passes by IMAGE helps understand the long-wavelength response of the WIC instrument.
  • An analysis of the sensitivity of WIC to OI airglow helps understand the sensitivity at the short end.
  • I was first author on a poster at the Fall 2004 AGU meeting, discussing the O/N2 signature of the October 2003 magnetic storms, with comparisons to neutral density measurements by CHAMP. That poster is available here.

Nightglow

  • A paper coming out in GRL describes the effects of upward propagating atmospheric tides on the ionopshere. Here is a link to a preprint. This paper is the result of a very fruitful collaboration between several research groups.
  • Sung Park has completed a large set of nightside 135.6-nm hourly emission maps.
  • My Equatorial Airglow page is now under construction. This was the topic of a CEDAR Workshop in 2003.
  • Here is our original study we did regarding the nighttime equatorial airglow emissions seen with the SI-13 channel of IMAGE/FUV. This is a preprint of a paper that is published in GRL.
  • And along those lines, here is a pdf of my poster I presented at EGS 2003 in Nice (minus a couple pages that were in portrait). The peer reviewed paper describing those results is published in Annales Geophysicae, and the original manuscript can be found here.
  • Further work in the area of nightglow continues. A recent paper accepted by GRL showing the redistribution of nightside plasma as imaged by IMAGE-SI13 under storm conditions combined vTEC from GPS stations is posted here for your perusal. The discovery of a global wavenumber-4 zonal variation in the equatorial ion densities by Sagawa et al. (2005), and the evidence of the effects of the disturbance dynamo in the 2002 bubble drift data are both described in my Fall 2004 AGU presentation, which can be downloaded here.

Aurora
  • The proton auroral imager allows us to see a most interesting phenomenon, subauroral precipitation of protons. This manuscript briefly describes one particular observation, which was described in greater detail in the May 15, 2002 GRL.
  • We've continued studies of the subauroral proton arcs with investigations of the signatures of the arcs in ground-based magnetometers. An upcoming AGU monograph on inner plasmaspheric dynamics and processes will have a paper on this topic. You can download a preprint of the paper here.
  • Here's a nice example of a substorm over Poker Flat observed from space, and a preliminary energy analysis.
  • The October 2003 storm was probably the most substantial of this solar cycle. IMAGE caught the onset of this storm.

Modeling

  • Finally this paper is in press in JGR. It describes the different effects of opposite signs of IMF By on the development of thermospheric storms. The companion paper works with synthetic inputs, and this second paper uses actual IMF values to drive the convection.
  • This has to do with both airglow and modeling. Here is the pdf of my COSPAR 2002 presentation, where I discussed the effect of IMF orientation on the development of thermospheric storms. Watch for the paper in Adv. Space. Res (possibly to be published this decade!).
  • This project to determine the effect of varying high latitude convection on the eventual effects of heating inputs at middle latitudes is further discussed at its own homepage. Two drafts of papers describing that research are forthcoming.

Software

  • Extract_imageinfo.pro and the big associated library is my own tool for extracting UDF data to IDL structures. The distribution also contains a recent build of fuview.pro, the IMAGE FUV browse software.
  • My musings on building a shared object library of the MSIS executables on Solaris or Mac OS 10.1+ are here.
  • A quick discussion of one issue with mapping images in IDL.


Also, I finally have a publications list that I will maintain bi-annually.