The Carrington storm (September 1/2, 1859) is one of the largest magnetic storms ever observed and it has caused global auroral displays in low-latitude areas, together with a series of multiple magnetic storms during August 28 and September 4, 1859. In this study, we revisit contemporary auroral observation records to extract information on their elevation angle, color, and direction to investigate this stormy interval in detail. We first examine their equatorward boundary of "auroral emission with multiple colors" based on descriptions of elevation angle and color. We find that their locations were 36.5 deg ILAT on August 28/29 and 32.7 deg ILAT on September 1/2, suggesting that trapped electrons moved to, at least, L~1.55 and L~1.41, respectively. The equatorward boundary of "purely red emission" was likely located at 30.8 deg ILAT on September 1/2. If "purely red emission" was a stable auroral red arc, it would suggest that trapped protons moved to, at least, L~1.36. This reconstruction with observed auroral emission regions provides conservative estimations of magnetic storm intensities. We compare the auroral records with magnetic observations. We confirm that multiple magnetic storms occurred during this stormy interval, and that the equatorward expansion of the auroral oval is consistent with the timing of magnetic disturbances. It is possible that the August 28/29 interplanetary coronal mass ejections (ICMEs) cleared out the interplanetary medium, making the ICMEs for the Carrington storm on September 1/2 more geoeffective.
It is known that extreme interplanetary coronal mass ejections (ICMEs) released from sunspots can cause severe magnetic storms, especially when they have southward magnetic fields (e.g., Tsurutani et al., 1992Tsurutani et al., , 2008;;Gonzalez et al., 1994;Daglis, 2000Daglis, , 2004;;Daglis and Akasofu, 2004;Willis & Stephenson, 2001;Willis et al., 2005;Echer et al., 2008b;Vaquero et al., 2008;Vaquero & Vazquez, 2009;Schrijver et al., 2012;Odenwald, 2015;Lakhina & Tsurutani, 2016;Hayakawa et al., 2017c;Usoskin, 2017;Takahashi and Shibata, 2017;Riley et al., 2018). During magnetic storms, the horizontal component of geomagnetic fields decreases at low and middle latitudes (Gonzalez and Tsurutani, 1987;Gonzalez et al., 1994). Among the magnetic observations over approximately the past 1.5 centuries, the largest magnetic storm ever observed is considered the Carrington storm in 1859 (Chapman & Bartels, 1940;Jones, 1955;Chapman, 1957;Mayaud, 1980;Tsurutani et al., 2003;Cliver & Svalgaard, 2004;Lakhina andTsurutani, 2016, 2017). Recent studies suggest evidence of several intense magnetic storms in the coverage of magnetic observations such as those in 1872 (Silverman, 1995(Silverman, , 2006(Silverman, , 2008;;Silverman & Cliver, 2001;Vaquero et al., 2008;Cliver & Dietrich, 2013;Viljanen et al., 2014;Lefèvre et al., 2016;Lockwood et al., 2017;Lakhina and Tsurutani, 2017;Love, 2018;Hayakawa et al., 2018b;Riley et al., 2018), satellite observations of a near miss extreme ICME in 2012 (Baker et al., 2013;Liu et al., 2014), and historical evidence before the coverage of magnetic observations (Willis et al., 1996;Ebihara et al., 2017;Hayakawa et al., 2016bHayakawa et al., , 2017aHayakawa et al., , 2017bHayakawa et al., , 2017cHayakawa et al., , 2018a)).
On September 1, Carrington (1859) and Hodgson (1859) witnessed a white light flare within a sunspot group as large as 2300~3000 msh (millionths of solar hemisphere) (e.g. Cliver & Keer, 2012;Hayakawa et al., 2016a), just before the maximum of the solar cycle 10 in 1860 (Clette et al., 2014;Clette and Lefevre, 2016;Svalgaard and Schatten, 2016). This flare is estimated to be X45±5 in terms of SXR class based on the amplitude of magnetic crochet and considered one of the most extreme flares in observational history (Boteler, 2006;Cliver and Dietrich, 2013). On the following day (September 1/2), the ICMEs released from this active region brought intense magnetic storms with a maximum negative intensity of ~1600 nT at Colaba (Tsurutani et al., 2003;Nevanlinna, 2004Nevanlinna, , 2006Nevanlinna, , 2008;;Viljanen et al., 2014;Kumar et al., 2015;Lakhina andTsurutani, 2016, 2017). Great auroral displays in low-latitude areas were reported at observation sites down to 22-23° magnetic latitude (hereafter, MLAT), as shown in Figure 1 (Kimball, 1960;Tsurutani et al., 2003;Cliver & Svalgaard, 2004;Cliver & Dietrich, 2013;Hayakawa et al., 2016a;Lakhina & Tsurutani, 2016, 2017). In addition to this storm, multiple magnetic storms occurred during the interval between August 28 to September 4, 1859 (Kimball, 1960;Green et al., 2006;Green & Boardsen, 2006;Hayakawa et al., 2016a;Lakhina & Tsurutani, 2017), resulting from multiple flaring from the solar active region that could produce the multiple ICMEs and multiple sheaths, as is usually the case with extreme events (Mannucci et al., 2005;Willis et al., 1996Willis et al., , 2005;;Tsurutani et al., 2007Tsurutani et al., , 2008;;Cliver & Dietrich, 2013;Hayakawa et al., 2017c;Lakhina & Tsurutani, 2017).
Figure 1: A drawing of auroral display with corona at Melbourne Flagstaff Observatory (S37°49′, E145°09′; -47.3° MLAT) at 22:26 on September 2, 1859, reproduced from Neumeyer (1864). Neumeyer (1864, p.242) describes this auroral observation as “At 10.26 p.m. the light of stars of the third and fourth magnitude very much enfeebled. Beautiful rays through “Pisces”. During the last 10 or 15 minutes a beautiful red arc of light, extending from E. to W., and passing through the crown, had become almost stationary. It followed the astronomical equator to a height of 70° where it deviated towards south”. This drawing is reproduced in Cliver and Keer (2012) as well.
The auroral records during this stormy interval have been surveyed and re-discovered after Kimball (1960) also. So far, the records such as those in US ship logs (Green et al., 2006;Green and Boardsen, 2006), American newspapers (Odenwald, 2007), Australian reports (Humble, 2006), Spanish newspapers (Farrona et al., 2011), historical documents in East Asia (Willis et al., 2007;Hayakawa et al., 2016a), and Mexican newspapers (Gonzalez-Esparza and Cuevas-Cardona, 2018) have been surveyed. These re-discovered records have provided further insights upon the auroral displays during this stormy interval.
These magnetic storms caused one of the earliest space weather disasters or space storms (see also Daglis (2003) for the terminology), such as a disturbance in the telegraph system (e.g.
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