Comparison between Swarm measured and IRI-2016 ,IRI-Plas 2017 modeled electron density over low and mid latitude region

Abstract

In the present paper, we investigate the electron density observations from the Langmuir probes (LPs) onboard low Earth orbiting (LEO) Swarm satellites. To accentuate its employability in model improvements, we compared the extracted F2 region critical electron density (foF2) and its corresponding altitude (hmF2) with the Digisonde observations and IRI-Plas 2017 model estimations at eight worldwide Digisonde locations during the year 2020. We attempted to visualize the discrepancy in magnitude between Swarm observation and IRI-Plas 2017 by independent simulation and then optionally ingesting the Digisonde foF2 and hmF2 parameters into the model. The results show that during nighttime, Swarm LP measured electron density model overestimates the IRI-Plas 2017 modeled electron density for all the stations. To confirm the above results, a comparison analysis has been performed for the Ne-Swarm A and Swarm B observations with that of IRI-2016 simulated output keeping the topside sub model as NeQuick along with other default options. The results show that Ne from Swarm A and Swarm B is higher than IRI-2016 estimations during the nighttime with the ratio ranging from 1 to 5 whereas during the daytime the ratio remains 0 to 1. This confirms that Swarm Ne observations have significantly higher values during nighttime over global region, reinforcing further studies on the surged nighttime variables. It has been also observed that there is no latitudinal disperency between Swarm and IRI-Plas 2017 modeled or IRI-2016 modeled observations.