The Earth’s auroral ionosphere as a coupled, driven, and active system is governed by Maxwell’s equations and a description of plasma motions. The drivers of the auroral ionosphere are delivered over multiple spatial and temporal scales that draw dramatically different responses in the ionosphere-thermosphere system. It is not possible to disentangle mesoscale processes of auroral arc systems with traditional single-point observations. Ionospheric system science benefits now from (a) the advent of distributed and heterogeneous sensor platform arrays, together with (b) newly capable three-dimensional self-consistent computational models which bypass standard idealizations and (c) new computational tools built on machine learning platforms. Constraining auroral system science requires distributed fine-grained observations, as well as physics-based models capable of constructing simulations consistent with a multiplicity of observations. We welcome observational, modeling, and data science presentations that are enabled by distributed measurements of the auroral ionosphere.

• SM - SPA-Magnetospheric Physics