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arxiv: 2605.31046 · v2 · pith:A3LP5NLFnew · submitted 2026-05-29 · ⚛️ physics.space-ph · astro-ph.EP· astro-ph.IM· physics.plasm-ph

Predictive radar tracking reveals >500 mV/m electric-field transients during the May 2024 superstorm

classification ⚛️ physics.space-ph astro-ph.EPastro-ph.IMphysics.plasm-ph
keywords fieldburstsclusterduringelectricextremeradarshape
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The bulk motion of E-region radar aurora provides a sparsely distributed, direct measurement of the ionospheric electric field in intermittent bursts. We present a tracking procedure for \textsc{icebear} VHF measurements of Farley-Buneman waves. Each cluster is represented as an $\alpha$-shape; frame-to-frame association is a Hungarian linear-assignment problem with a cost combining centroid distance and shape Intersection-over-Union; kinematic prediction amounts to a degenerate Kalman filter. Births, deaths, splits, and mergers are monitored; each tracked trajectory is reduced to per-segment velocities by piecewise-linear regression. We validate against \textit{in-situ} observations. During the G5 storm of 10 May 2024, on closed dayside field-lines, our method recovers a five-second cluster moving at $11{,}240\pm660$~m/s, implying an electric field strength of $\approx 560$~mV/m, a value that exceeds documented sub-auroral thermal emission speeds and the most extreme reported sub-auroral drifts. The detection is consistent with extreme E-field structures appearing as short-lived bursts, representing field variability, and we provide parameterizations of this variability for space weather modeling.

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