Abstract
The auroral electrojet is traditionally measured remotely with
magnetometers on ground or in low Earth orbit (LEO). The sparse
distribution of measurements, combined with a vertical distance of some
100 km to ground and typically >300 km to LEO satellites,
means that smaller scale sizes can not be detected. Because of this, our
understanding of the spatiotemporal characteristics of the electrojet is
incomplete. Recent advances in measurement technology give hope of
overcoming these limitations by multi-point remote detections of the
magnetic field in the mesosphere, very close to the electrojet. We
present a prediction of the magnitude of these disturbances, inferred
from the spatiotemporal characteristics of magnetic field-aligned
currents. We also discuss how Zeeman magnetic field sensors (Yee et al.,
2020) onboard the Electrojet Zeeman Imaging Explorer (EZIE) satellites
will be used to essentially image the equivalent current at
unprecedented spatial resolution. The electrojet imaging is demonstrated
by combining carefully simulated measurements with a spherical
elementary current representation using a novel inversion scheme.