Space weather encompasses understanding how the near-space environment responds to forces from lower-atmosphere weather systems as well as conditions on the Sun. Although the specific effects of space weather (including power grid failures, communication outages, and navigation errors when using space-based navigation systems such as GPS) are local in nature, understanding and predicting their occurrence requires a global view of the environment. Here we initiated a first attempt to link one solar event which occurred on 2014 February 25, and affected the Earth’s upper atmosphere.

Despite the absence of artificial light pollution at Antarctic plateau sites such as Dome A, other factors such as airglow, aurorae and extended periods of twilight have the potential to adversely affect optical observations. We present a statistical analysis of the airglow and aurorae at Dome A using spectroscopic data from Nigel, an optical/near-IR spectrometer operating in the 300–850 nm range. The median auroral contribution to the B, V and R photometric bands is found to be 22.9, 23.4 and 23.0 mag arcsec−2 respectively. We are also able to quantify the amount of annual dark time available as a function of wavelength; on average twilight ends when the Sun reaches a zenith distance of 102.6°.