A Comparative Study of Estimating Auroral Electron Energy from Ground-Based Hyperspectral Imagery and DMSP-SSJ5 Particle Data

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This paper is well written describing important results. It has a clear methodology and also easy to read all sections. However, there are a few errors in the paper, which need to be addressed in order to make the paper suitable for publication. Overall, I feel this paper is suitable for publication in Remote Sensing, however other reviewer's opinion should be considered to make any decision. Please find my comments below. Aurora phenomenon is mainly caused by particle precipitation- important for energy of auroral electrons. This paper estimates auroral electron characteristic energies, using both ground-based hyperspectral imagery and DMSP-SSJ5 particle data. Results show a strong correlation between their estimated data and F18/SSJ5 data. Particularly, it shows the possibility to jointly use remotely-sensed and in-situ data for investigating the auroral characteristics. This paper is very well written and scientifically sounds good. I feel this paper should be accepted after minor corrections below. 1. The introduction section is quite weak at the moment and needs some motivation as well as more references. 2. Line 72-79: I would suggest to add more motivation of this work. Currently the importance of this research is not clearly presented. 3. Figure 2 can be improved, not clear at this moment 4. Line 120-123: Please use EMCCD or CCD terms for electron-multiplying charge-coupled device, at this moment is confusing. 5. Line 164-170: First sentence should be rewritten with more explanation, while second sentence should be divided into two sentences. 6. Line 215-216: characteristic energy is considered to be within (El, Er)? Should need more explanation. Not clear why? 7. Table 3 caption should be improved 8. Figure 6 and 7 are not visually clear. Need to improve. 9. Special Sensor J5 (SSJ5) is the key of this paper. Here, proper references and information of previous work on SSJ5, are essential. 10. A clear statement should be provided on future work and limitations.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The authors develop an iterative technique to determine the best-modeled characteristic auroral energy compared with ground based hyperspectral data. They then compare these estimates to satellite-based measurements of the characteristic energy. This paper is well-written and easy to follow, even for someone like me outside the specific field.

 

Some clarifications that may be useful to include in further revisions:

 

How good are other estimates of characteristic energy?

How good do you need them to be to do the science you want to do?

 

Some notes:

Lines 1365-137:

“…energy state to a high-level state u and finally stays in a state l

that has the energy lower than l but higher than u …”  This statement seems odd – how can an energy state be lower than the lower state (l) and higher than the higher state (u)?

 

346 “Error! Reference source not found..” Seems like an error in LaTex compiling maybe?

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf