The Kluane Lake region in the Canadian Yukon territory is subject to regular drainage-flow dust plumes emanating from the Slims River basin. We have recently employed ground- and satellite-based remote sensing (RS) techniques to analyze the complementarity and redundancy of such RS retrievals relative to springtime Kluane Lake measurements made using a suite of microphysical and meteorological instruments. Our preliminary results include a correlation analysis between ground- and satellite-based CM (coarse or super-μm mode) AOD (aerosol optical depth) retrievals and between ground-based CM AODs and their surface microphysical analogues of particle-volume concentration, supported by 1.5 μm Doppler (HSRL) lidar profiles. The analysis includes an opto-physical interpretation of strongly and weakly correlative illustrations.

The NASA InSight mission, landing in late November 2018, promises to revolutionize our understanding of Martian interior structure via analysis of seismic data returned by the SEIS instrument. The extent to which the mission’s potential is realized will depend on the number of detectable seismic events that occur during the period of operation. Here I estimate the rate of detectable events generated by volcano-tectonic activity on Mars based on extrapolation of Hawai’i’s seismic record. I use a catalog of 5603 earthquakes spanning 48 years [IRIS, 2018], with moment magnitudes MW ranging from 3.0 to 6.9, to derive the Gutenberg-Richter (G-R) frequency-magnitude relation for the Island of Hawai’i, expressed as log(N) = a – b MW, where N is the number of earthquakes with magnitudes greater than or equal to MW, and a and b are constants. By this analysis, one earthquake with MW 5.1 or greater can be expected every year at Hawai’i. Under the assumption that the mechanisms of seismicity associated with edifice building are similar at Hawai’i and Olympus Mons (supported by observation of decollement-based volcanic spreading at both), I use the same b for both settings and scale a according to estimates of magmatic volume flux rates dV/dt at both settings. Over the 80 Myr history of the Hawaiian-Emperor volcanic chain, dV/dt ≈ 1.7 x 10-2 km3/yr. An estimate of dV/dt for the Olympus Mons volcano on Mars was derived from paleotopographic analysis of a set of lava flows south of Olympus Mons with discordant topography. Given the mean flow age from crater counts (210 Ma), an estimate of the amount of volcanic material needed to cause deflections of flow orientations of the required magnitudes yields estimates of dV/dt over this timespan ranging from 6.33 x 10-4 to 6.43 x 10-3 km3/s. Taking the mean of these values and scaling a by the ratio of dV/dt values for Mars and Hawai’i yields a rate of at least 1 quake of MW = 4.4 or greater per year (Figure 1). Thus, under several assumptions (including a steady recent magma supply rate for Olympus Mons), we can expect ≈ 2 volcano-tectonically driven quakes of magnitude MW > 4.4 from the vicinity of Olympus Mons during the nominal 2 Earth-year InSight prime mission. This is a conservative lower bound that does not consider contributions from numerous potential volcano-tectonic sources in Tharsis and elsewhere on Mars.

Over the last decades, the receiver function technique has been widely used to image sharp discontinuities in elastic properties of the solid Earth at regional scales. To date, very few studies have attempted to use receiver functions for global imaging. One such endeavour has been pursued through the project “Global Lithospheric Imaging using Earthquake Recordings” (GLImER). Building on the advances of GLImER, we have developed PyGLImER - a Python-based software suite capable of creating global images from both P-to-S and S-to-P converted waves via a comprehensive receiver function workflow. This workflow creates a database of receiver functions by downloading seismograms from selected earthquakes and analysing the data via a series of steps that include pre-processing, quality control, deconvolution, and stacking. The stacking can be performed for common conversion points or single stations. All steps leading to the creation of receiver functions are automated. To visualise the generated stacks, the user can choose the desired survey area in a graphical user interface, and then explore the selected region either through 2D cross-sections or a 3D volume. By incorporating results from two independent seismic phases, we can combine the advantages of both phases for imaging different discontinuities. This results in an increased robustness and resolution of the final image. For example, we can use constraints from S receiver function images, which are multiple-free but relatively low resolution, to differentiate between real lithospheric/asthenospheric structures and multiple-induced artefacts in higher-resolution P receiver function images. Our preliminary results agree with those from recent regional and global studies, confirming the workflowís robustness. They also indicate that the new workflow combining P and S receiver functions has the potential to resolve global lithospheric discontinuities such as the lithosphere-asthenosphere boundary (LAB) or the midlithospheric discontinuity (MLD) more reliably than approaches using only one type of incident phase. PyGLImER will be distributed as open-source software, providing an easily accessible tool to rapidly generate high-resolution images of structures in the lithosphere and asthenosphere over large scales.

The Ridgecrest sequence (Mw6.4 and Mw7.1, July 2019, California) is a cross-fault earthquake that has been observed using a wide range of geophysical and geological methods. The sequence ruptured consecutively two orthogonal cross-fault systems within 34 hours (northeast- and northwest-trending). It raised the question of the relation between the two systems of faults both at depth and at the surface, and its impact on the surface displacement pattern. Here we use high-resolution (50 cm) satellite optical image correlation to measure the 3D surface displacement field at 0.5 meters ground resolution for the two earthquakes. Because our images bracket the whole sequence, our displacement and deformation maps include both earthquakes. Our data allow for measuring series of slip profiles in the components parallel and perpendicular to the rupture, and in the vertical direction, to look at the correlation between slip distribution and rupture complexity at the surface. We point out significant differences with previous geodetic and geological-based measurements and show the essential role of distributed faulting and diffuse deformation in the comprehension of surface displacement patterns. We discuss the segmentation of the rupture regarding the fault geometry and along-strike slip variations. We image several surface deformation features with similar orientation to the deeply embedded fabric identified in seismic studies. This northeast-trending fabric influenced the surface deformation both during the foreshock and the mainshock earthquakes. We also derive strain fields from the horizontal displacement maps and show the predominant role of rotational and shear strains in the rupture process. We finally compare our results to kinematic inversions and show that the foreshock did influence the mainshock by clamping the fault and encouraging off-fault diffuse deformation rather than fault slip in some areas.

The NASA Earth Science Education Collaborative (NESEC) project has the goal to enable broad participation in authentic NASA Earth Science STEM experiences for lifelong learners. These experiences include citizen science through GLOBE Observer (part of the international GLOBE Program), student investigations and research projects, field campaigns, and internships (including both virtual and in-person participation). NESEC works with strategic partners to develop, deliver, and strengthen these experiences. The 2020 pandemic required shifting our approach to adapt and emphasize ways to participate that did not require going outdoors and could be undertaken from home. These resources included activities, not requiring special equipment and using materials that can be found at home. Activities were that work well with families – including different ages and generations – and encourage exploration, play, and building curiosity together about science and the environment. NESEC leverages partnerships with informal education providers, in particular libraries, which This presentation discusses results of field testing with families and emerging evidence of best practices for partnerships and resources to support science and learning at home.

Large life, as currently present on Earth, diversified during a late and seemingly non-trivial historic event. Although other biological revolutions – such as the advent of photosynthesis or the eukaryotic cell – are attributed to innovations within life itself, the dramatic diversification of animals tends to associated with a change in the environment. The environmental change that remains most thoroughly explored and debated is that of a synchronous increase of free oxygen. Paradoxically, studies of multicellularity from the perspective of tissue and of successful tumor growth highlight how oxic settings are incompatible with the core mechanism of tissue renewal (Ivanovic, 2009). Tumor biology also demonstrates biological mechanisms that, through the hypoxia inducible transcription factors (HIFs), overcome this paradox (Pietras et al., 2008) and, thus, allow tissue renewal despite oxic settings. We have explored how HIFs may serve as an adaption within multicellularity that allow viable large life forms in the oxic setting, by offering improved control of the cellular hypoxia-response machinery that sustain oxygen-insensitive growth of complex tissue. We found that this control is animal-specific and is at its highest refinement within vertebrate animals; in which the innovation of high-oxygen carrying capacity through red blood cells followed first subsequently (Hammarlund et al., 2018). We hypothesize that such a refinement within biology itself, during the Neoproterozoic, allowed metazoans to fully access and exploit the primordial oxic niche on Earth. Testable predictions of this perspective, such as that invertebrate animals and other large multicellular organisms still require phases or settings of truly hypoxic conditions to manage tissue renewal, have implications that reach from geology and medicine to astrobiology. Indeed, a perspective based in the prerequisites of tissue maintenance suggests that being large is a biological achievement of cosmic proportions.

Shortages of electricity in Colombia associated with droughts during El Niño-Southern Oscillation warm events lead government to seek diversification of the electricity matrix, which is mainly hydro (66%). Additionally, clean technologies like wind and solar power are alternatives to climate change. Potentially, solar radiation is high year-round in Colombia due to its low latitude, but clouds are the most critical limiting factor. In this paper, we measure and analyze the variations in efficiency resulting from different weather variables. Toward that end, we measure three photovoltaic systems located in three different zones of the valley. Simultaneously, we analyzed some of the limiting factors which influence solar radiation. For that, we consider radiation from 3 pyranometers, air temperature and relative humidity from meteorological sensors, water vapor density, liquid and solid water content from a microwave radiometer, reflectances as a proxy of clouds from GOES 16 satellite visible band 2. To identify clouds, we estimated radiance thresholds for the GOES information in the three locations of interest from changes in the surface radiation data. These thresholds provide identification of the most sensible hours for radiation based on the anomalies of the radiation under cloudiness conditions. Lastly, the efficiencies on each location were calculated considering the power data, as a proportion of the horizontal global radiation and the area of each solar panel.

Climate change is a problem that involves science, economics, and politics. Particularly in the United States, political resistance to addressing climate change has been exacerbated by a concerted misinformation campaign against the basic science, a negative response to how the proposed solutions to climate change intersect with values. Scientists often propose more climate science education as a solution to the problem, but preliminary studies indicate that more science education does not necessarily reduce polarization on the topic (Kahan et al. 2012). Is there a way that we can better engage non-science students in topics related to climate change that improve their comprehension of the problem and its implications, overcoming polarization? In an existing political science course, “Do You Want to Build a Nation?”, we are testing a new digital world-building model based on resource development and consequent environmental and societal impacts. Students spend half the class building their nations based on their assigned ideology (i.e., socialist, absolute monarchy, libertarian) and the second half of the class negotiating with other nations to resolve global issues while remaining true to their ideologies. The course instructor, co-author Lennon, and ASU’s Center for Education Through eXploration have collaborated to design a digital world model based on resources linked to an adaptive decision-making environment that translates student policies into modifications to the digital world. The model tracks students’ exploration and justification of their nation’s policy choices. In the Fall 2017 offering of the course, we will investigate how this digital world model and scenarios built around it affect student learning outcomes. Specifically, we anticipate improved understanding of the policy trade-offs related to energy development, better understanding of the ways that different ideologies approach solutions to climate change, and that both will result in more realistic diplomatic negotiations in the latter half of the course. We will report on the technical details of how the digital world model and scenarios are constructed as well as how students responded to the scenario.

Scientific research is increasingly collaborative and globally distributed; research groups now rely on web- based scientific tools and data management systems to simplify their day-to-day collaborative workflows. However, such tools often lack seamless interfaces, requiring researchers to contend with manual data transfers, annotation and sharing. MyGeoHub is a web platform that supports out-of-the-box, seamless workflows involving data ingestion, metadata extraction, analysis, sharing and publication. MyGeoHub is built on the HUBzero cyberinfrastructure platform and adds general-purpose software building blocks (GABBs), for geospatial data management, visualization and analysis. A data management building block iData, processes geospatial files, extracting metadata for keyword and map-based search while enabling quick previews. iData is pervasive, allowing access through a web interface, scientific tools on MyGeoHub or even mobile field devices via a data service API. GABBs includes a Python map library as well as map widgets that in a few lines of code, generate complete geospatial visualization web interfaces for scientific tools. GABBs also includes powerful tools that can be used with no programming effort. The GeoBuilder tool provides an intuitive wizard for importing multi-variable, geo-located time series data (typical of sensor readings, GPS trackers) to build visualizations supporting data filtering and plotting. MyGeoHub has been used in tutorials at scientific conferences and educational activities for K-12 students. MyGeoHub is also constantly evolving; the recent addition of Jupyter and R Shiny notebook environments enable reproducible, richly interactive geospatial analyses and applications ranging from simple pre- processing to published tools. MyGeoHub is not a monolithic geospatial science gateway, instead it supports diverse needs ranging from just a feature-rich data management system, to complex scientific tools and workflows.

Cloud water interception (CWI) is not captured by conventional rain gauges and not well characterized, but could have ecohydrological significance in systems such as tropical montane cloud forests. Quantifying CWI is necessary to assess the impacts of climate and land cover changes in places such as Hawai‘i. CWI can be estimated from wind speed, cloud liquid water content (LWC), and vegetation characteristics with an empirical model. Cloud microphysics sensors measure LWC accurately, but are expensive and often designed only for use on aircraft. LWC can be estimated by fog gauges, but poorly constrained catch efficiency and spurious rain catch can cause large errors. Visibility is related to LWC, but the relationship is non-linear and depends on the (usually unknown) drop size distribution. This study is part of a project aimed at mapping CWI across the Hawaiian Islands. Earlier analyses found disagreement between LWC estimated from fog gauge and visibility observations at the project field sites. In this study, we experimented with a novel in situ observation platform and cross disciplinary collaboration to compare cloud microphysics observations with those commonly used in cloud forest studies. Field missions took place from April to July 2018 at the summit of Mt. Ka‘ala (1,200 m) on O‘ahu Island. We built a pickup truck-mounted mobile weather station that can be assembled in the field, with weather-sensitive processing modules inside the cab. A total of 10 instruments were deployed: Phase Doppler Interferometer, Cloud Droplet Probe, fog gauge, visibility sensor, rain gauge, wind monitor, camera, water isotope sampler, UAV atmospheric sensor, and Aerosol Spectrometer. A nearby long-term station provides climate and canopy water balance data. Analyses found a strong relationship between visibility and LWC in dense fog. The fog gauge showed weak correlations due to coarse resolution and false rain catch, but had a reasonable catch efficiency. The start of fog catch lagged compared to the nearby station possibly due to screen surface wetting. Concurrent with other analyses, one goal is to calibrate the fog gauge and visibility sensor for long-term LWC monitoring. The mobile platform was effective for short-term deployment of airborne sensors. We hope to repeat the experiment in the future on O‘ahu and other islands.

Forecast-Informed Reservoir Operations (FIRO) enables modern weather forecasting technology to be incorporated into Water Control Plans. FIRO provides water managers with more lead time to selectively retain or release water from reservoirs in anticipation of droughts or floods. Managing reservoirs with improved forecasts can optimize benefits such as water supply and fisheries without impairing flood risk management. FIRO viability at Lake Mendocino was assessed according to five management scenarios and evaluated using 16 metrics. Through detailed hydrologic engineering analysis, the difference in water availability was calculated comparing baseline operations and the FIRO alternatives. Based on the evaluation criteria and implementation considerations, the Modified Hybrid alternative was selected and Ensemble Forecast Operations was designated as a reach goal. The benefits assessment considered the water availability difference between baseline and FIRO operations with respect to recreation, hydropower, municipal and industrial water supply, agricultural water supply, and fisheries. To calculate the recreation benefit, daily use values were applied to estimated recreational activity at Lake Mendocino. Hydropower benefit was calculated by applying regional retail electricity prices to the increased electricity generated under FIRO operations. Municipal and industrial water supply benefit was determined by quantifying changes in consumer surplus due to an increase in water reliability. Changes in consumer surplus were determined by estimating demand curves for water usage and using price elasticity of demand. Agricultural water supply benefits were calculated as annual avoided losses and used the residual imputation method. The least-cost method was used to monetize fisheries benefit of FIRO based on changes in downstream flow and water temperature. Results are being integrated into the Lake Mendocino FIRO Final Viability Assessment, which will be finalized by December 2020. A decision support tool (DST) will allow users to input data from other FIRO projects to predict benefits and inform tradeoff decisions. This presentation will share results of the economic assessment, preview the DST, and describe a transferability test case at Prosser Reservoir in the Truckee River Basin.

Accurately estimating the net seasonal snow accumulation (or “winter balance”) on glaciers is central to assessing glacier health and predicting glacier runoff. However, measuring and modeling snow distribution is inherently difficult in mountainous terrain, resulting in high uncertainties in estimates of winter balance. Our work focuses on uncertainty attribution within the process of converting direct measurements of snow depth and density to estimates of winter balance. We collected more than 9000 direct measurements of snow depth across three glaciers in the St. Elias Mountains, Yukon, Canada in May 2016. Linear regression (LR) and simple kriging (SK), combined with cross correlation and Bayesian model averaging, are used to interpolate estimates of snow water equivalent (SWE) from snow depth and density measurements. Snow distribution patterns are found to differ considerably between glaciers, highlighting strong inter- and intra-basin variability. Elevation is found to be the dominant control of the spatial distribution of SWE, but the relationship varies considerably between glaciers. A simple parameterization of wind redistribution is also a small but statistically significant predictor of SWE. The SWE estimated for one study glacier has a short range parameter (90 m) and both LR and SK estimate a winter balance of ~0.6 m w.e. but are poor predictors of SWE at measurement locations. The other two glaciers have longer SWE range parameters (~450 m) and due to differences in extrapolation, SK estimates are more than 0.1 m w.e. (up to 40%) lower than LR estimates. By using a Monte Carlo method to quantify the effects of various sources of uncertainty, we find that the interpolation of estimated values of SWE is a larger source of uncertainty than the assignment of snow density or than the representation of the SWE value within a terrain model grid cell. For our study glaciers, the total winter balance uncertainty ranges from 0.03 (8%) to 0.15 (54%) m w.e. depending primarily on the interpolation method. Despite the challenges associated with accurately and precisely estimating winter balance, our results are consistent with the previously reported regional accumulation gradient.

Coral reefs are one of the most diverse ecosystems on Earth and provide significant ecological, economic, and societal benefits valued at approximately $9.8 trillion U.S. dollars per year. While there are multiple ways humans threaten coral reefs, climate change has become the single most important of these threats. NOAA’s Coral Reef Watch is the only program that operationally issues coral bleaching forecasts, using near real-time satellite monitoring to provide ecological nowcasting of the ocean heat stress that can cause mass coral bleaching and using climate models to forecast the potential for bleaching months into the future. Ocean temperatures began to rise in mid-2014, starting what turned out to be three full years of marine heatwaves that caused corals to bleach — expelling their symbiotic algae. When the film team at Exposure Labs started exploring how to film coral bleaching as it happened, Coral Reef Watch was an obvious partner. Exposure Labs worked with numerous scientists, including me as a Co-Chief Scientific Advisor, to get the science behind the Sundance-Award Winning film Chasing Coral correct. The film team went to great extremes to ensure every statistic, graph, scientific principle, and animation was clear and accurate – using science to explain and support the adventure of trying to capture the first on-reef time-lapse imagery of this important phenomenon. The result is a visually compelling film that tells the story of climate change and its impacts on an important ecosystem in a way that appeals to audiences, including viewers who usually would not sit down to watch a climate change documentary. Chasing Coralis an extremely effective combination of science and art that opens opportunities for dialogue on climate change in ways no scientific paper ever could.

The Weather Research and Forecasting with Chemistry (WRF-Chem) community model have been widely used for the study of pollutants transport, formation of secondary pollutants, as well as for the assessment of air quality policies implementation. A key factor to improve the WRF-Chem air quality simulations over urban areas is the representation of anthropogenic emission sources. There are several tools that are available to assist users in creating their own emissions based on global emissions information (e.g. anthro_emiss, prep_chem_src); however, there is no single tool that will construct local emissions input datasets for any particular domain at this time. Because the official emissions pre-processor (emiss_v03) is designed to work with domains located over North America, this work presents the Another Assimilation System for WRF-Chem (AAS4WRF), a ncl based mass-conserving emissions pre-processor designed to create WRF-Chem ready emissions files from local inventories on a lat/lon projection. AAS4WRF is appropriate to scale emission rates from both surface and elevated sources, providing the users an alternative way to assimilate their emissions to WRF-Chem. Since it was successfully tested for the first time for the city of Lima, Peru in 2014 (managed by SENAMHI, the National Weather Service of the country), several studies on air quality modelling have applied this utility to convert their emissions to those required for WRF-Chem. Two case studies performed in the metropolitan areas of Sao Paulo and Manizales in Brazil and Colombia, respectively, are here presented in order to analyse the influence of using local or global emission inventories in the representation of regulated air pollutants such as O3 and PM2.5. Although AAS4WRF works with local emissions information at the moment, further work is being conducted to make it compatible with global/regional emissions data file format. The tool is freely available upon request to the corresponding author.

Since many years precession is regarded as an alternative flow driving mechanism that may account, e.g., for remarkable features of the ancient lunar magnetic field [Dwyer 2011; Noir 2013; Weiss 2014] or as a complementary power source for the geodynamo [Malkus 1968; Vanyo 1991]. Precessional forcing is also of great interest from the experimental point of view because it represents a natural forcing mechanism that allows an efficient driving of conducting fluid flows on the laboratory scale without making use of propellers or pumps. Within the project DRESDYN (DREsden Sodium facility for DYNamo and thermohydraulic studies) a dynamo experiment is under development at Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) in which a precession driven flow of liquid sodium with a magnetic Reynolds number of up to Rm=700 will be used to drive dynamo action. Our present study addresses preparative numerical simulations and flow measurements at a small model experiment running with water. The resulting flow pattern and amplitude provide the essential ingredients for kinematic dynamo models that are used to estimate whether the particular flow is able to drive a dynamo. In the strongly non-linear regime the flow essentially consists of standing inertial waves. Most remarkable feature is the occurrence of a resonant-like axisymmetric mode which emerges around a precession ratio of Ωp/Ωc = 0.1 on top of the directly forced re-circulation flow. The combination of this axisymmetric mode and the forced m=1 Kelvin mode is indeed capable of driving a dynamo at a critical magnetic Reynolds number of Rmc=430 which is well within the range achievable in the experiment. However, the occurrence of the axisymmetric mode slightly depends on the absolute rotation rate of the cylinder and future experiments are required to indicate whether it persists at the extremely large Re that will be obtained in the large scale sodium experiment.

The interior of lakes is often quiescent and most of the mixing in a lake occurs at the sloping boundaries, where wind-induced internal waves create turbulence (which leads to mixing) through interactions with the lakebed. To predict the occurrence and strength of turbulence in terms of meteorological forcing and stratification, we investigated the dependence of internal wave type, and their contribution to turbulence on the slope, on the Lake number, which compares the stabilizing tendency of stratification to the destabilizing tendency of the wind. Three thermistor chains and a meteorological station were deployed in West Okoboji Lake (length ~ 9 km, max. depth ~ 40 m) for two weeks. A wavelet analysis was conducted to determine time periods when different wave frequencies were excited, with particular focus on the first vertical mode seiche, the critical frequency with respect to the stratification and slope, and high frequency waves in the band of 1-10 times the buoyancy frequency. We measured the velocities in the bottom boundary layer (BBL) with a high resolution acoustic current profiler (2 MHz Nortek HR Aquadopp) and then computed the turbulent dissipation rate using the structure function method, which uses the spatial correlations of velocity along a beam to estimate the dissipation. This generated a two week time series of turbulent dissipation rate in the BBL which was then compared to the wavelet amplitudes. During the deployment, a strong daily wind forced near constant internal wave activity. The theoretical period of the first vertical mode seiche was ~17 hours, but the diurnal wind forcing interfered with free oscillation of this mode. Although not an obvious natural frequency of the lake, waves of the critical frequency (which had a period of ~11 hours) were activated throughout the measurement period. High-frequency waves were observed in the thermistor chain near the slope at the lowest Lake number wind events. The turbulence observed on the boundary was highest during these events, implying that the low frequency seiching was less important than higher frequency motions in driving turbulence on the slope.

We examine the role of transient and standing eddies in an idealized model with a Southern Ocean analog and two basins in the Southern hemisphere. We use the new MOM6 code base in an entirely adiabatic configuration, which allows for full equilibrium integration in only 100 years of simulation time. Fine resolution eddy-resolving simulations at 1/16- and 1/8-degree resolutions are performed in cases with and without continental barriers and/or bottom roughness. A time- and zonal-Reynolds averaging approach is used to decompose eddy fluxes into transient eddies and standing meanders. For a flat bottom channel the wind driven overturning circulation is balanced by transient eddies, consistent with previous studies. However, when continental barriers or bottom roughness are present, we find that standing meanders are dominant in the Southern Ocean.

The question of how many satellites it would take to accurately map the spatial distribution of ionospheric outflow is addressed in this study. Given an outflow spatial map, this image is then reconstructed from a limited number virtual satellite pass extractions from the original values. An assessment is conducted of the goodness of fit as a function of number of satellites in the reconstruction, placement of the satellite trajectories relative to the polar cap and auroral oval, season and universal time (i.e., dipole tilt relative to the Sun), geomagnetic activity level, and interpolation technique. It is found that the accuracy of the reconstructions increases sharply from one to a few satellites, but then improves only marginally with additional spacecraft beyond ~4. Increased dwell time of the satellite trajectories in the auroral zone improves the reconstruction, therefore a high-but-not-exactly-polar orbit is most effective for this task. Local time coverage is also an important factor, shifting the auroral zone to different locations relative to the virtual satellite orbit paths. The expansion and contraction of the polar cap and auroral zone with geomagnetic activity influences the coverage of the key outflow regions, with different optimal orbit configurations for each level of activity. Finally, it is found that reconstructing each magnetic latitude band individually produces a better fit to the original image than 2-D image reconstruction method (e.g., triangulation). A high-latitude, high-altitude constellation mission concept is presented that achieves acceptably accurate outflow reconstructions.