A computationally compact representation of Magnetic-Apex and Quasi-Dipole coordinates with smooth base vectors

Quasi-Dipole coordinates are appropriate for calculations involving horizontally stratified phenomena like height-integrated currents, electron densities, and thermospheric winds; Modified Apex coordinates are appropriate for calculations involving electric fields and magnetic field-aligned currents.

The calculation of these coordinates requires computationally expensive tracing of magnetic field lines to their apexes. Interpolation on a precomputed grid provides faster coordinate conversions, but requires the overhead of a sufficiently fine grid, as well as finite differencing to obtain coordinate base vectors. In this paper, we develop a compact and robust representation of the transformation from geodetic to Quasi-Dipole (QD), Apex, and Modified Apex coordinates, by fitting the QD coordinates to spherical harmonics in geodetic longitude and latitude.