Spherical Elementary Coordinate System for Reconstructing Ionospheric Plasma Flow

SuperDARN is a network of radars, managed by the University of Virginia, which produce line of sight (LOS) velocities for plasma flows in the ionosphere. A spherical elementary coordinate system (SECS) can be used to reconstruct the velocity field of the plasma. The SECS method works by placing an arbitrary grid of divergence free poles on the ionospheric shell and computing scaling factors at each pole to correspond to the observed LOS velocities. We develop the SECS model in Python for ease of use and test its accuracy by reconstructing artificial test vector fields. The error of the reconstructed field is small, validating this model for use with SuperDARN. The SECS method is an efficient way to reconstruct plasma flows in the ionosphere.