Effect of Ionospheric Variability on the Electron Energy Spectrum produced from Incoherent Scatter Radar Measurements

The impact of variability in the ionospheric densities on the inversion from electron density profiles to differential energy spectra during auroral precipitation is investigated. The ionospheric composition is modeled for relevant minor and major species at 80 - 150 km and combined with the ElSpec algorithm [Virtanen et al., 2018]. The results are compared to previous investigations. To handle the arising computational challenges, an iterative approach is adapted, switching between the inversion with a fixed ion composition and updating the ion composition with the ionospheric chemistry model.