abstract
- Section 6.2; ; This section presents a review of models that have been developed for calculating energetic electron and proton transport and their resulting ionization rates along the penetration depth within the Earth’s atmosphere. The focus is not on the production or acceleration mechanisms of precipitating particles, but instead on the geoeffectiveness (specifically, particle-impact ionization) resulting from collisional interactions of incident energetic particles with ambient atmospheric neutrals. As a key process in the magnetosphere-ionosphere-thermosphere coupling, the collisional effects from precipitating particles play a critical role and require an accurate description. In this section, a brief introduction of sophisticated particle transport models is provided, followed by a review of fast calculation methods that have been developed. An accurate and computational efficient method of particle-impact ionization calculation is particularly needed in large-scale computations.