The first Geospace Modeling Program (GEM) campaign, the boundary layer campaign, focused on the cusp, the dayside magnetopause, and dayside magnetospheric boundary layers. One of the projects pursued during this campaign was a construction of synoptic maps of convective flows and particle regions within the polar ionosphere for different orientations of the interplanetary magnetic field. In 1996, the GEM steering committee recommended that these synoptic maps be used for data-model comparisons to provide tests of model convection patterns, convection strengths, separatrix locations, boundary layers, and currents. The papers that follow this introductory paper describe results of the data-model comparisons. This paper summarizes the data analysis approach and the results that were obtained that are important for the comparisons. ¿ 1998 American Geophysical Union