Complex Analysis of Polar Auroras for 1996

Geomagnetic and auroral fluctuations feature bursts of activity on multiple spatial and temporal scales. Statistics of these activity bursts, at both high- and low-latitudes, show strong scaling properties that indicate the magnetosphere tends to operate in a stable critical state. Recent work shows how this complex behavior is ubiquitous throughout the magnetosphere and possesses power law intermittency statistics implying global and/or local self-organized critical dynamics. Here we provide a detailed description of an analysis technique to study multiscale correlations of high-resolution ultraviolet images of the nighttime sector of the northern aurora from the Ultraviolet Imager onboard the Polar spacecraft. Each image is considered as a fractal surface, whose roughness varies and is reorganized during intense magnetospheric activity. We test to see how the fractal roughness varies as a function of other measures of activity, such as the geomagnetic indices SYM-H and AE.