A multiresolution approach to auroral precipitation and its impacts on the ionosphere-thermosphere coupling

Auroral precipitation in high latitudes is a vital magnetospheric energy deposition process. A series of studies have been conducted on its multiscale characteristics which is important to determine thermospheric global and local neutral and ion responses. We propose a new approach to resolve the auroral precipitation by applying a multiresolution Gaussian process model (Lattice Kriging, Nychka et al., 2015) to the auroral imaging data. The new model is efficient in resolving auroral processes of various spatial scales and the amount of computation only increases linearly with the input data. It is also a spatiotemporal model which incorporates satellite- and ground-based imaging data and empirical models in a coherent way considering their different spatial and temporal coverages. Auroral maps of different scales obtained from this model are provided as the input to thermosphere ionosphere electrodynamics general circulation model (TIEGCM) to study neutral and ion responses to magnetospheric energy deposition in different scales.