Ionospheric Remote Sensing

The mission of the NASA GOLD* instrument is to observe EUV airglow emissions and obtain information about the structure and dynamics of the thermosphere, the region of the upper atmosphere above about 90 km in altitude.  During the daytime, the airglow (dayglow) primarily arises from the stimulation of atomic oxygen and molecular nitrogen by the EUV sunlight and provides information about the composition and temperature of the unionized gases in the thermosphere.  Once the sun sets, most of the airglow disappears, leaving a remnant (nightglow) that arises from the ionized component (the ionosphere) of the thermosphere.  The nightglow exposes the structure of the ionosphere which evolves during the night, revealing the dynamics of the ionosphere.

This site is devoted to the Nightglow observations and provides a catalog of the GOLD nightime images intended to guide researchers in their search for data relevant to their studies.  The catalog is organized by year and month, with each page containing a gif animation for each night of observations.  The thumbnail of each gif animation is intended to allow the user to view the brightness images.  The meta data in the header of each image is quite readable on an Apple Retina display, but they can also be clicked to see the full scale images, and they can be right-clicked to download to your device.  If you use them in a publication, I only ask that you reference this source.  For quantitative studies, I strongly recommend that you download the actual data from either of the two sources listed below and develop your own tailored display code.  

The actual data may be obtained from:

The GOLD site: [https://gold.cs.ucf.edu/data/search/] or

The NASA SPDF archive [https://spdf.gsfc.nasa.gov/pub/data/gold/]



*Global-scale Observation of the Limb and Disk