Installation of 2 all sky cameras for the monitoring of the southern auroras

The survey of the aurora using all sky cameras is particularly important for understanding Solar-Terrestrial relationships, auroral and ionospheric physics purposes and space weather. It allows mapping the auroral oval, detecting specific large-scale and meso-scale structures in their geometry and thus better understanding the related phenomenology and coupling with the magnetosphere and the solar wind. The auroras occur both in South and North along an oval centered on the magnetic poles. If the overall shape of both south and north ovals are similar, it exists some differences which are still poorly characterized. It is thus necessary to measure simultaneously both ovals. These ovals are sparsely covered, especially the South one. Our Japanese colleagues from the NIPR proposed to build an international collaboration for a better coverage of the Southern oval. This necessitates to install as a first step two cameras, one in Dumont d’Urville and another in Concordia to complete the network. On the European side, this collaboration will concern French (IPAG, IRAP, EOST) and Italian (INAF, INGV) institutes which have solid expertise in space plasma physics through polar and subpolar scientific activities.

The cameras are provided by the Japanese team as well as the housing for them. We plan to install them during the austral summers 2024-2025 and 2025-2026 if possible during one single campaign both at Dumont d’Urville and Concordia. A second campaign for a maintenance after one year is also planned. The first campaign will be performed by one Japanese colleague and one French people. The second campaign will be performed by one Japanese people and one French person, however the goal is to install these cameras for long term observations and regular upgrades will probably be mandatory.

A pre-study is right now performed with the technical and logistical teams at Dumont d’Urville and Concordia to check the needs of term of housing, data transfer, power and maintenance on site during overwintering. All data will strictly follow the mandatory FAIR Principles as legally and officially requested by instances such as: the SCAR, the French Ministry of Higher Education and Research, and the CNRS. An open License will be affixed onto the data: international public License Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 CC BY4.0. Permanent and unique identifiers will be minted onto obtained time series (Digital Object Identifiers). All metadata will duly referenced all involved infrastructures (French & Japanese institutions) with their corresponding ROR IDs.

The installation of these two cameras could be, if the logistical conditions allow it, a first step of the installation of other optical instrument allowing to cover both ovals. These instruments could be spectrometers and spectro-imagers. It is also linked with some auroral space missions, such as ESA Aurora-D and C and SMILE (Wang et al, 2022), and are complementary since ground-based instruments data can be perturbed by clouds and moonlight but covers continuously a geographical location during night time and space data are more sparse due to orbital period but not perturbed by clouds. In case an auroral volume is sighted by at least 3 imagers, some tomographic reconstruction can be possible. As dense as possible ground-based network are then extremely useful especially when coupled with space images. Added to this, the All sky cameras data will be coupled with SuperDARN radars and ground-based magnetometers data at Kerguelen, Dumont d’Urville and Concordia (from the French and Italian teams) and at Syowa (from Japanese team) allowing a better description of the southern polar ionosphere.