Recent models have made it possible to obtain distributions of ionospheric and field-aligned currents at high latitudes from surface magnetic observations. The surface geomagnetic field variations at high latitudes are closely associated with interplanetary medium parameters. As a result, a model has been developed that estimates high-latitude current distributions directly from the interplanetary magnetic field and solar wind values. Ionospheric and field-aligned current distributions computed with this technique are compared to the distribution computed directly from the Magsat magnetic field observations by Zanetti et al. [1983>. There are small variations in the two results, which are apparently due to the different resolutions of the two techniques. However, the current distributions computed from the different techniques are similar.