Aurora provides an essential diagnostic to spatial and temporal variations of terrestrial space environment and is also an important proxy of solar and geomagnetic activities. Contemporary auroral observations have just continued for more than half a century. Visual auroral phenomena recorded in historical books provide key clues to understand the solar and geomagnetic activities in the long history prior to modern era. In this study, we compiled a new auroral catalog from ancient Korean historical books, including 2013 auroral records with day‐level resolution from 1012 to 1811 CE, especially for the records searched from the Seungjeongweon Ilgi. The number of auroral records in this new catalog is greatly enlarged compared with previous lists. The occurrence of the aurora in the new catalog is generally consistent with previous data sets. This extended data set provides valuable support for various studies related to solar‐terrestrial space weather and ancient climates in the past millennium.
Localized regions of low geomagnetic intensity such as the South Atlantic Anomaly allow energetic particles from the Van Allen radiation belt to precipitate into the atmosphere and have been linked to a signature in the form of red aurora–like airglow visible to the naked eye. Smoothed global geomagnetic models predict a low-intensity West Pacific Anomaly (WPA) during the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries characterized by a simple time dependence. Here, we link the WPA to an independent database of equatorial aurorae recorded in Seoul, South Korea. These records show a complex fluctuating behavior in auroral frequency, whose overall trend from 1500 to 1800 AD is consistent with the locally weak geomagnetic field of the WPA, with a minimum at 1650 AD. We propose that the fluctuations in auroral frequency are caused by corresponding and hitherto unknown fluctuations in the regional magnetic intensity with peaks at 1590 and 1720 AD, a time dependence that has been masked by the smoothing inherent in regularized global geomagnetic models. A physical core flow model demonstrates that such behavior requires localized time-dependent upwelling flows in the Earth’s core, possibly driven by regional lower-mantle anomalies.
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