Using Optical Flow to Derive Horizontal Velocities of Equatorial Plasma Bubbles

• goal of this project is to find horizontal drift velocities based on differences in total electron content over time
• read my paper
• acknowledgements to Dr. R. Pradipta for support and providing the data & Mrs. Croce and Dr. Arrigoni for additional support

data:

• 480 txt files (each corresponds to a point in time; increment 3 mins apart)

  • only first 110 frames considered

• Each txt file contains 551 lines (each corresponds to different latitude; increment by 0.2°)

• and each line contains 501 numbers (each column corresponds to different longitude; increment by 0.2°)

• each value is a TEC reading at that location and time; one unit is 10¹⁶ electrons/m²

  • negative values represent depletions

• note: data in input & output files not published on github because of size limitations

analysis

• read in data as consecutive image frames
• using optical flow to give motion vectors to images ~ treat like a video
• use output vectors of depletions (figure 1) to calculate average velocities of moving depletions

** Figure 1 ** These are the output vectors from optical flow. Each individual arrow represents the path of a detected feature. 50 features were detected, some of which belong to the same depletion.