![]() (2019) owe to the digitization of such precious data, especially the microfilm archived at the Japanese Meteorological Agency. The new findings reported by Kataoka et al. This event serves as a valuable point of contact between the modern recording of data and pictorial records taken over a long period of time. The aurorae were photographed for the first time, and several hand-made sketches were also recorded at the same time. ![]() Top five magnetic storms with the most negative Dst index since 1957.įor a few hours from 1000 UT on 11 February 1958 onward, northern lights were observed over northern Japan. On 11 February 1958, communications were disrupted between Japan and the expedition ship because of the occurrence of a record-large magnetic storm which attracted great public attention. The second overwintering campaign was abandoned. In 1958, the expedition ship was at several 100 km away from Syowa Station and could not reach the station due to bad weather and thick ice. Syowa Station is located at high magnetic latitude of 69.6° (geographic coordinates S69.00, E39.59). Many Japanese citizens were aware of aurorae since 1957, when the first Japanese Antarctic Research Expedition (JARE) was successful to build the Antarctic research station Syowa and start overwintering. In 1989, there was another chance to see aurora from Hokkaido, Japan ( Table 1), but at that time photography was already a popular tool. It is very rare to see aurorae from Japan because of its low magnetic latitude, and the main reason why no auroral paintings were reported since then would be due to the fact that Japanese citizens rapidly adopted to take photographs rather than making paintings to record such rare phenomena. It was about 61 years ago that the last watercolor painting of aurora was recorded in Japan. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License ( ), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. It is found that the red aurora reached up to 400 km at 41° magnetic latitude, which is 1.0° higher in magnetic latitude than the red aurora which appeared just before the peak time of the magnetic storm. Combined with the hand-made sketch of the same red aurora seen from the Abashiri Local Meteorological Office (located at 34° magnetic latitude) at 1215 UT, the position of the red aurora is determined via triangulation. The painting gives information of the elevation angle of the red aurora seen from low latitude (27.4° magnetic latitude) at 1205–1225 UT during the beginning of the recovery phase of the magnetic storm. * Corresponding author: 61 years old watercolor painting of red aurora was recently provided from a Japanese citizen, and it contributed to understand the detailed time evolution around the peak time of the large magnetic storm on 11 February 1958. The Akaeda Hospital, 578-2 Kamikawai-cho, Yokohama, Kanagawa 241-0802, Japan National Institute of Polar Research, 10-3 Midori-cho, Tachikawa, Tokyo 190-8518, Japanĭepartment of Polar Science, SOKENDAI, 10-3 Midori-cho, Tachikawa, Tokyo 190-8518, Japan Ryuho Kataoka 1 ,2 * and Shigeru Kazama 3
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