Toward real-time mapping of ionospheric electric fields and currents Original Research Article

This paper points out that there are, at least, two components (or modes) in magnetospheric and ionospheric disturbances such as storms, substorms, and convection enhancements. One is global disturbances which can be predicted reasonably well by proper solar wind parameters, and the other is local disturbances that are presumably caused by some internal processes in the magnetosphere-ionosphere system. This paper also outlines our new “nowcast” system which uses ground-magnetograms to estimate two-dimensional maps of electric fields and currents in the polar ionosphere. It is demonstrated that the output from magnetogram-inversion schemes can also become the basic input for magnetospheric specification modeling.