Empirical relationship between nightside reconnection rate and solar wind / geomagnetic measurements

According to the expanding-contracting polar cap paradigm, dayside and nightside reconnection control magnetosphere-ionosphere dynamics at high latitudes by increasing or decreasing the open flux respectively. The dayside reconnection rate can be estimated using parameters measured in the solar wind, but there is no reliable and available proxy for the nightside reconnection rate. We want to remedy this by using AMPERE to estimate a time series of open flux content. The AMPERE data set originates from the global Iridium satellite system, enabling continuous measurements of the field-aligned Birkeland currents, from which the open magnetic flux of the polar caps can be derived. These estimates will be used to derive empirical relationships with available measurements on the ground and in the solar wind. This work can also help improve estimates of dayside reconnection rates.