A New Method to Retrieve Electron Precipitation Spectra from High Altitude Balloon X-ray Spectrometer Data

Patrick, Matthew

SM033-0002
A New Method to Retrieve Electron Precipitation Spectra from High Altitude Balloon X-ray Spectrometer Data

Monday, 14 December 2020

Poster

Matthew Patrick¹, Christopher M Cully¹, Alexa Jean Halford², Robyn M Millan³, Geoffrey D Reeves⁴ and Michael P McCarthy⁵, (1)University of Calgary, Calgary, AB, Canada, (2)NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, United States, (3)Dartmouth College, Department of Physics and Astronomy, Hanover, NH, United States, (4)Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM, United States, (5)University of Washington Seattle Campus, Earth and Space Sciences, Seattle, WA, United States

Abstract:

We present a new way to retrieve the fluxes and energy spectra of energetic electron precipitation events using high altitude balloon X-ray spectrometer data. The new method avoids the inevitable under-fitting caused by assuming exponential or mono-energetic forms for the electron spectrum. We test our method against a published comparison between RBSP MAGEIS and BARREL X-ray spectrometer measurements of a relativistic electron precipitation event (Halford et. al. 2014). Physics-based constraints allow us to obtain the actual functional form and parameters of electron spectra based on high altitude X-ray data, even in the presence of significant measurement noise.

SM033-0002 A New Method to Retrieve Electron Precipitation Spectra from High Altitude Balloon X-ray Spectrometer Data

Abstract:

SM033-0002
A New Method to Retrieve Electron Precipitation Spectra from High Altitude Balloon X-ray Spectrometer Data