Auroral precipitation refers to energetic particles that come down into the upper part of our atmosphere, the ionosphere. There, they collide with atoms and molecules and transfer some of their energy, causing aurora. The most rapid time-variation of this energy deposition and its consequences on the ionosphere are not fully understood. We show here that one can use a new model to study auroral precipitation on sub-second timescales and advance our understanding about small-scale dynamic aurora.

The E-region of the Earth’s ionosphere plays an important role in atmospheric energy balance and High Frequency radio propagation. In this paper, we compare predictions from two recently developed ionospheric models to observations by ionospheric sounders (ionosondes). Overall, the models show reasonable agreement with the observations. However, there are several areas for improvement in the models as well as questions about the accuracy of the automatically processed ionosonde dataset.