Empirical models of electron precipitations at the Earth’s ionosphere high latitudes: a review

Abstract

This paper presents a review of the Earth’s ionosphere empirical models of high-latitude energetic electron precipitations. In total, the review includes twelve models. Those models represent the full spectra from the earliest to the most recently developed ones. The majority of models were derived from the DMSP mission data. Models by McDiarmid et al., Spiro et al., Zhang & Paxton, Kamp et al., and Wu et al. are the exceptions. The first two models were developed before the DMSP mission era. Most of considered models are based on a physical representation of precipitating electron fluxes. However, some models are utilizing the purely “technician” approach. Those models are constructed for each channel of the DMSP/SSJ4 detector separately. Nowadays, AFGL, Ovation Prime (OP), and OP-2013 are the most popular models. The AFGL model is the first one with reasonable accuracy being available for public use. However, OP/OP-2013 models are becoming more popular now. They provide the finer specification of the electron precipitations over the AFGL model but require the solar wind in situ observations as the input parameter.