Empirical models of the Earth’s ionosphere field-aligned currents: a review

Abstract

In this paper, we present a review of empirical models of the Earth’s ionosphere field-aligned currents (FAC). In total, seven FAC models were considered. Iijima and Potemra’s model was one of the earliest ones. It described a general structure of FAC distribution and could be used as a FAC common pattern. Papitashvili & co-auth., Lukianova & co-auth., and Weimer improved descriptions of FAC distributions using the larger amount of data from various satellite missions. Their models were published as a set of printed maps of the FAC distributions for various geophysical situations. Recent models (MFACE, AMPS, and EW-FAC) are provided as MATLAB, Python, and IDL software, respectively. These models are the high-resolution (finer spatial grid) description of FAC distributions with improved dependence on the Interplanetary Magnetic Field and Solar wind impacts.