Development and testing of KITES

KITES is a first-principles kinetic theory computer code for modeling the behavior of atmospheric electrons in the presence of strong, short-duration, fast-risetime or high-frequency electromagnetic fields. In this report we describe the development and testing of this code, including a complete description of the kinetic theory model used, the model's range of validity, and the numerical methods used to solve the resulting equations. The model uses only experimentally measured cross sections as input and contains no free parameters. To check the validity of the model, the results of KITES calculations are compared with an analytic model and experimentally measured steady-state electron transport parameters and excellent agreement is found.