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Climatological convection modeling has been carried out for decades by binning various localized measurements of the ionospheric plasma velocity or electric field collected over the high-latitude regions versus some set of parameters, most often the interplanetary magnetic field (IMF) components. Such models often are used to drive circulation models such as the Thermosphere Ionosphere Electrodynamic General Circulation Model (TIEGCM) (Roble & Ridley, 1994) and the Global Ionosphere-Thermosphere Model (GITM) (Ridley et al., 2006). They are also used to constrain the data driven convection patterns produced from Super Dual Auroral Radar Network (SuperDARN) data (Ruohoniemi & Baker, 1998). The measurements have been collected using a variety of instruments such as satellite based drift meters (e.g., Heelis et al., 1982) or electric field booms (e.g., Heppner & Maynard, 1987), incoherent-scatter radar (Foster, 1983), ground-based magnetometers (e.g., Papitashvili et al., 1994, and coherent-scatter radars (e.g., Ruohoniemi & Greenwald, 1996). Construction of the models typically has involved grouping observations based upon prevailing IMF and solar wind conditions, and perhaps some other parameter such as the planetary K-index (k p ) (Heppner & Maynard, 1987), or the geomagnetic Auroral Electrojet Index (A e ) (Weimer, 2005), or the dipole tilt angle (Thomas & Shepherd, 2018), and then using the binned observations to constrain an expansion of the electrostatic potential in a set of orthogonal functions.

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