Analysis of Citizen Science Aurora Data Collected by Aurorasaurus in 2017

Aurorasaurus is a citizen science project that uses Twitter as the foundation to report aurora from the ground up. Reports are sent in during auroral activity by citizen scientists, whether professionals or amateurs, allowing for a global range of involvement. The goal of the reports being to learn how far reaching aurora can be with different strength solar storms, and test our prediction of the intensity and viewing area of the storm that is displayed on the website. At the end of the year, direct reports and aurora-related tweets get collected from Twitter and sorted based on validation. We use this data for analysis to draw conclusions about the aurora and the reports made. The 2017 data will be used to show growth within the project and how the collaboration between the project and citizen scientists can be used to validate aurora-related space weather forecasts. Improvements within the project, such as ways to get more citizen scientist involvement, can be made from the yearly data that is collected from the tweets. The data can be showcased in ways such as showing the relationship between the number of reports received and the daily average Kp value. The analysis of the data will benefit citizen scientists, the field of space weather, and the Aurorasaurus project.