A comparative study of auroral morphology distribution between northern and southern hemispheres based on automatic classification

摘要

Aurora is a very important geophysical phenomenon in the high latitude of Arctic and Antarctic regions, and it is significant to make a comparative study of the auroral morphology between the two hemispheres. Based on the morphological characteristics of the four labeled dayside auroral types (include auroral arc, drapery corona, radial corona and hot-spot aurora) on the 8001 dayside auroral images at Chinese Yellow River Station in 2003, and by extracting the local binary pattern (LBP) features and using k-nearest classifier, this paper makes an automatic classification to the 65361 auroral images of the Chinese Yellow River Station during 2004–2009 and the 39335 auroral images of the South Pole Station between 2003–2005, and finally obtains the occurrence distribution of the dayside auroral morphology in northern and southern hemispheres. The statistical results indicate that the four auroral types present similar occurrence distribution between the two stations. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to report the statistical comparative results of dayside auroral morphology distribution between northern and southern hemispheres.