Plain language summary
Plasma in the ionosphere convects across high latitudes in response to
electric fields generated by solar wind driving of Earth’s
magnetosphere. Magnetic data from the 66-satellite Iridium satellite
constellation is routinely analyzed to measure the electric currents
flowing between the ionosphere and magnetosphere. In this paper, we
combined these observed field-aligned currents with a model of the
ionospheric conductance to estimate the corresponding electric field in
the ionosphere. We used these electric field estimates to specify the
plasma convection in a first-principles ionosphere model, and compared
the results against independent data in a moderately disturbed period.
The results of our case study indicate that the technique works well,
although plasma convection is not the only factor that causes
uncertainty into predictions of the high-latitude ionosphere. The data
used here can be made available in near-real-time, so it is possible
that our technique could be adopted for operational space weather
prediction.