Reply to comment by Kil et al. on “The night when the auroral and equatorial ionospheres converged”

Abstract

One of the goals of the Martinis et al. (2015) (M15) paper was to stimulate interest in the topic of “severe events during moderate geomagnetic storms”—and we succeeded. We welcome the Comment by Kil et al. (2016) (K16) who identified weak signatures related to medium-scale traveling ionospheric disturbances (MSTIDs) and tried to argue that airglow depletion signatures of equatorial spread F (ESF) were not present. We agree with K16 in that MSTIDs were present to the north of the all-sky imager, but only during the early observations. They are easily distinguished from the ESF-related dark structures observed at the same time to the south of the imager. We stress some observational facts that K16 overlooked or erroneously used to support their case. M15 offered evidence and discussion evidence and discussion of a dynamical pattern—both in space and time domains—and the counter arguments by K16 should have dealt with the same places and same times. We also point out that the GPS data shown by K16 do not provide any information below ~30° geographic latitude in the longitude sector covered by the all-sky imager. This is the region where the ESF structures appeared first and grew to reach higher latitudes. We believe that the issues addressed by K16 do not provide conclusive evidence to rule out the interpretation given by M15 on the nature of the airglow depletions observed at McDonald Observatory.