Online computation of International Reference Ionosphere Extended to Plasmasphere (IRI-Plas) model for space weather

Abstract

Ionosphere is the most challenging part of Space Weather with its spatio-temporal variability and dispersive nature. Ionospheric models are very important in reducing positioning error in GNSS system. International Reference Ionosphere (IRI) is an empirical, deterministic and climatic model of ionosphere up to 2000 km in height. Recently, IRI Extended to Plasmasphere (IRI-Plas) model has been developed to extend the interest region of IRI to the GPS orbital height of 20,000 km. Both IRI and IRI-Plas provide ionospheric parameters such as electron density, electron and ion temperatures according to their height profiles. In order to update the model to current ionospheric conditions, IRI-Plas can input F2 layer critical frequency (foF2), maximum ionization height (hmF2), and also Total Electron Content (TEC). Online IRI-Plas is developed for the ionospheric community to run multiple tasks at various locations, dates and times with optional foF2, hmF2 and TEC inputs in a user-friendly manner. In this paper, we are going to present the capabilities of the Online IRI-Plas service and provide some comparisons between IRI-Plas outputs and ionosonde measurements. The comparison between online IRI-Plas foF2 outputs and ionosonde foF2 measurements indicates that the model with TEC input can significantly improve the representation of the current ionospheric state, which is very successful especially in the geomagnetically disturbed days.