The Amie procedure: Prospects for space weather specification and prediction

The Assimilative Mapping of Ionospheric Electrodynamics (AMIE) procedure synthesizes diverse observations of high-latitude ionospheric electrodynamic phenomena into "snapshot" synoptic maps of conductances, electric fields, currents, and related parameters. It makes use of available statistical information concerning average patterns, standard deviations, and correlation distances of the various parameters. The algorithm incorporates a number of features that would facilitate operational use, including its automatic checking for outliers to help identify bad data, its ability to function even when data are sparse or missing, and its estimation of the uncertainties in its mapped outputs. At present, AMIE is a specification model rather than a forecast model, although its mathematical structure could allow inclusion of time as an additional dimension, which would permit temporal extrapolation. Nonetheless, a specification model of convection and particle precipitation can be used to help initialize forecast models of thermospheric winds and composition, ionospheric electron density, and inner-magnetospheric particle populations.