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.