Instruments on board the NOAA Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite (POES) continually monitor the energy of the protons and electrons that produce aurora in the atmosphere. The Space Environment Center (SEC) has developed a technique that uses the observations obtained during a single pass of the satellite over a polar region (which takes about 25 minutes) to estimate the total power deposited in an entire polar region by these auroral particles. For more information on these measurement, see SEC's POES Auroral Activity page.

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