From jweygand@igpp.ucla.edu Sun Jan  5 21:09:47 2025
Date: Sun, 5 Jan 2025 12:09:42 -0800 (PST)
From: James Weygand <jweygand@igpp.ucla.edu>
To: Maria Hamrin <Maria.Hamrin@space.umu.se>
Subject: Re: THEMIS SECS quicklook not working for April 2017?


Hej Maria,

________________________________________________________________________________
From: "Maria Hamrin" <Maria.Hamrin@space.umu.se>
To: "jweygand" <jweygand@igpp.ucla.edu>
Sent: Thursday, January 2, 2025 12:54:15 AM
Subject: Re: THEMIS SECS quicklook not working for April 2017?

Hej James,

And thanks for your quick response!

I note that I was naive, thinking that the stations had the same names... I also
note that Prince George is available in SuperMAG but there is no data  during
the event you showed. The data starts again in April 15. Perhaps the interval
has been removed in the processing/cleaning of the SuperMAG data...

JMW: I have no idea. I'm not sure the data can be fixed.

Is there any reason you would suggest us to use data from your THEMIS ftp site
(https://themis.ssl.berkeley.edu/data/themis/thg/ascii_data/) than from
SuperMAG? (We typically do not use TDAS/SPEDAS since my university does not have
the paid version of IDL).

JMW: I actually download from
http://themis.ssl.berkeley.edu/data/themis/thg/l2/mag/  and use the cdf files.
Also, I do not use IDL. I use Matlab, however, there is a python based SPEDAS
called something like pySPEDAS.


I've been in close contact with Jesper Gjerloev during my last own project
(https://doi.org/10.1029/2023JA031804) and I know they put a lot of effort on
cleaning/removing bad data (and I indeed helped them in my last project by
finding additional cases of bad data).

JMW: I use the older SUPERMag data (2000-2006) for some older stations (DTU and
MEASURE stations) and the data available are nicely cleaned up, but I do not
know when they decide to remove data altogether.

Whichever data base the student will be using, however, he must of course be
careful in the data he uses to look for bad data, offset etc and either remove
the data (or remove the offset if we believe that can be safely done).

JMW: Agreed.  didn't have  this information in the beginning so there were a
number of days that contributed to gray hair.

Thank you very much for your valuable help! We will of course also keep you
updated during the project and we hope that the project eventually can turn into
an article.

JMW: your welcome. I'll start harassing our IT guy  tomorrow to fix the  server.

thanks,

j


/Maria

-----------------------------------------------------------------
Maria Hamrin                     Email: maria.hamrin@space.umu.se
Associate Professor              Phone: +46 (0)70 325 80 38
Docent in space physics
Department of Physics
Umeå University
Linnaeus väg 24, 901 87 Umeå, Sweden
https://www.umu.se/personal/maria-hamrin/
https://www.umu.se/en/research/groups/space-plasma-physics-group/
-----------------------------------------------------------------
On 1/2/25 03:59, James Weygand wrote:

Hej Maria,

The station is Prince George, BC (PGEO). PG0 is in Antarctica.

FYI, I do not use SuperMAG data. I use the THEMIS FTP site and these have
different station codes and are frequently 4 letters.

Ok, so you are going to use Liisa SECS code applied to North America.
Just be aware that SuperMAG doesn't have all the  stations that I have.
Also, I'm using high temporal resolution data when I can.

thanks,
j

________________________________________________________________________________
From: "Maria Hamrin" <Maria.Hamrin@space.umu.se>
To: "jweygand" <jweygand@igpp.ucla.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, January 1, 2025 3:08:39 AM
Subject: Re: THEMIS SECS quicklook not working for April 2017?

Hi James,

Yes, I know Stephan. In fact, he worked in Umeå a couple months a few
years ago as a guest scientist in my department.

Thanks for the plot with the example of a bad current. A bit scary though,
because this looks just like plots I've seen people showing of events 
saying that there was a big space weather disturbance... Which station did
you mean has the offset? I'd like to look at it in the SuperMAG data base.
You wrote PGEO. Is it PG0 (as far as I know, the IAGA ideintifier is
alwarus 3 letters long)?

The master student will start in a few weeks (around Jan 20) so there is
no problem with the server. Moreover, I think he will start by computing
the currents himself first by using the IMAGE code, available in the
supplementary materia of
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-26732-2_2. In that way
he will become familiar with how everything works and also look into
details of the magnetometers and compare with already available currents,
e.g., on your web. I've had discussions with Liisa Juusola, and the code
should be possible to use both for magnetometers in Scandinavia and in
North America.

Happy New Year!

/Maria

-----------------------------------------------------------------
Maria Hamrin                     Email: maria.hamrin@space.umu.se
Associate Professor              Phone: +46 (0)70 325 80 38
Docent in space physics
Department of Physics
Umeå University
Linnaeus väg 24, 901 87 Umeå, Sweden
https://www.umu.se/personal/maria-hamrin/
https://www.umu.se/en/research/groups/space-plasma-physics-group/
-----------------------------------------------------------------
On 1/1/25 00:26, James Weygand wrote:

Hej Maria,

Sorry, Sadly I know no Swedish. I've worked with Stefan Eriksson
(Swede) at LASP  and he has taught me this much.

So thee is good news and bad news. I've finished remaking the plots
for April 2017, but the server is down again
and the IT guy won't be back until next week.

Other news. Attached is an example of a station with a bad offset.
There is a large splotch of current on the west coast.
This is due to a large offset at station PGEO.

Happy new year,
j

________________________________________________________________________________
From: "Maria Hamrin" <Maria.Hamrin@space.umu.se>
To: "jweygand" <jweygand@igpp.ucla.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, December 18, 2024 4:38:41 AM
Subject: Re: THEMIS SECS quicklook not working for April 2017?

Hej (you know a bit Swedish?) James,

Yes please, if you have some samples of weird data, send them to me.

As for April 2017, I don't think it has do be a problem right now.
I'll say to the student to avoid this month, at least in the
beginning. So no hurry with that.

/Maria

-----------------------------------------------------------------
Maria Hamrin                     Email: maria.hamrin@space.umu.se
Associate Professor              Phone: +46 (0)70 325 80 38
Docent in space physics
Department of Physics
Umeå University
Linnaeus väg 24, 901 87 Umeå, Sweden
https://www.umu.se/personal/maria-hamrin/
https://www.umu.se/en/research/groups/space-plasma-physics-group/
-----------------------------------------------------------------
On 12/18/24 02:12, James Weygand wrote:


Hej Maria,

Thanks for considering to include me as a coauthor.

Yes, feel free to include me in a zoom meeting. I hope I'll be
able to contribute.

If I find something weird in the near future I'll send you the
example.
Otherwise just look out for large spikes in the currents or
repeating current patterns over several hours.

FYI, I am slowly making new plots, but I have run into a
little problem.
I can't log into our server and will have to wait until our IT
person fixes the issue.
Also, are there any specific days of primary interest in April
2017 I should complete first.

thanks,
j

________________________________________________________________________________
From: "Maria Hamrin" <Maria.Hamrin@space.umu.se>
To: "jweygand" <jweygand@igpp.ucla.edu>
Sent: Tuesday, December 17, 2024 1:56:45 AM
Subject: Re: THEMIS SECS quicklook not working for April 2017?

Thanks James for your quick answer.

Of course you will be co-author when/if it becomes a paper (it
depends a lot on the student's success). If you want, and if
the student have good success during the spring, I could
invite you to a brainstorm science discussion over zoom. And
we will look out for weird signatures in the data such as
current spikes.

Merry Christmas!

/Maria

-----------------------------------------------------------------
Maria Hamrin                     Email: maria.hamrin@space.umu.se
Associate Professor              Phone: +46 (0)70 325 80 38
Docent in space physics
Department of Physics
Umeå University
Linnaeus väg 24, 901 87 Umeå, Sweden
https://www.umu.se/personal/maria-hamrin/
https://www.umu.se/en/research/groups/space-plasma-physics-group/
-----------------------------------------------------------------
On 12/17/24 04:43, James Weygand wrote:


________________________________________________________________________________
From: "Maria Hamrin" <Maria.Hamrin@space.umu.se>
To: "jweygand" <jweygand@igpp.ucla.edu>
Sent: Monday, December 16, 2024 2:20:30 AM
Subject: Re: THEMIS SECS quicklook not working for April
2017?

Dear Maria,

I was in contact with you some weeks ago about your
THEMIS SECS quicklook plots (see below). I'm glad to see
that your server seems to be up and running (but the
2017/4 directory seems still to be corrupted but that is
not why I email you today).

JMW: Unfortunately the server was down due to hardware
failure. It only just came up last week while I was at
AGU. I will start fixing the quicklook plots as quickly
as I can.


Why I'm contacting now is that I'll have a student
working for me the next semester looking into dB/dt
spikes and ionospheric (equivalent) current system. It
will be a study inspired by Schillings et al, [2023]
which I co-authored:
https://doi.org/10.1051/swsc/2023018

In specific, I'm planning that the student should
compute the "differential equivalent currents" for some
selected events (similar to what Schillings did using
the IMAGE network). To increases our potential data base
for interesting events, we would however like to use not
only IMAGE data but also THEMIS GBO from North America.

It looks like you have data files of equivalent
ionospheric currents (EICs) on
https://vmo.igpp.ucla.edu/data1/SECS/EICS/ together with
a README file of the format. That's good. 

My only question to you is if you have any good and/or
bad experiences from computing the differential EICs
from your data sets? Are there any caveats that we
should be aware about? Or anything else we should know
before we get started digging into the data?

JMW: There are a significant number of challenges to
computing the EICs from the magnetometer arrays in North
America and Greenland. Many of the magnetometer datasets
have not been cleaned up. There are a number of data gap
problems, magnetometer offset problems, data errors, and
data spikes. I do what I can to eliminate these
problems, but I cannot look at every bit of data. If you
find strange spikes in the currents let me know the date
and time and I'll do what I can to fix the problem.
There is a directory called
https://vmo.igpp.ucla.edu/data1/SECS/Stations/  . This
directory tell you which stations were available for
that day and looking at these files indicates which
region had good data coverage. Obviously avoid data near
the edges of the grid. the SECS can produce strange
results there.


Finally, I get little funding to upkeep and add to this
dataset. Please consider including me in your
publications.  Publications help me obtain grants.

thank you for your time,

james


Best,

/Maria

-----------------------------------------------------------------
Maria Hamrin                     Email: maria.hamrin@space.umu.se
Associate Professor              Phone: +46 (0)70 325 80 38
Docent in space physics
Department of Physics
Umeå University
Linnaeus väg 24, 901 87 Umeå, Sweden
https://www.umu.se/personal/maria-hamrin/
https://www.umu.se/en/research/groups/space-plasma-physics-group/
-----------------------------------------------------------------
On 11/23/24 23:48, James Weygand wrote:

Hi Maria,

Yes, I see. Unfortunately our server is being rebuilt.
If you have specific dates and times in mind let me know
and I'll make the plots for you and send them.

thanks,
j

----- Original Message -----
From: "Maria Hamrin" <Maria.Hamrin@space.umu.se>
To: "jweygand" <jweygand@igpp.ucla.edu>
Sent: Saturday, November 23, 2024 6:13:32 AM
Subject: THEMIS SECS quicklook not working for April 2017?

Dear James,

I am looking for THEMIS SECS quicklook plots for a couple of days in 
April 2017 for a potential space weather investigation.

I have checked in https://vmo.igpp.ucla.edu/data1/SECS/Quicklook/2017/04 
but it seems that all days I've looked at contains plots from April 2018 
instead.

I hope that this problem can be fixed.

Many thanks!

Best,
Maria Hamrin

-----------------------------------------------------------------
Maria Hamrin                     Email: maria.hamrin@space.umu.se
Associate Professor              Phone: +46 (0)70 325 80 38
Docent in space physics
Department of Physics
Umeå University
Linnaeus väg 24, 901 87 Umeå, Sweden
https://www.umu.se/personal/maria-hamrin/
https://www.umu.se/en/research/groups/space-plasma-physics-group/
-----------------------------------------------------------------







