Abstract
The International Reference Ionosphere (IRI) project was established jointly by the Committee on Space Research (COSPAR) and the International Union of Radio Science (URSI) in the late sixties with the goal to develop an international standard for the specification of plasma parameters in the Earth’s ionosphere. COSPAR needed such a specification for the evaluation of environmental effects on spacecraft and experiments in space, and URSI for radiowave propagation studies and applications. At the request of COSPAR and URSI, IRI was developed as a data-based model to avoid the uncertainty of theory-based models which are only as good as the evolving theoretical understanding. Being based on most of the available and reliable observations of the ionospheric plasma from the ground and from space, IRI describes monthly averages of electron density, electron temperature, ion temperature, ion composition, and several additional parameters in the altitude range from 60 km to 2000 km. A working group of about 50 international ionospheric experts is in charge of developing and improving the IRI model. Over time as new data became available and new modeling techniques emerged, steadily improved editions of the IRI model have been published. This paper gives a brief history of the IRI project and describes the latest version of the model, IRI-2012. It also briefly discusses efforts to develop a real-time IRI model. The IRI homepage is at http://IRImodel.org.
Highlights
The successful launch and operation of satellites in space, starting in the late fifties, gave us an in situ view of space conditions and initiated a technological revolution that is still ongoing
There are a number of reasons why modeling of the solar activity variations of the electron temperature is a difficult task: (1) While most ionospheric parameters increase with solar activity Te can increase, decrease, or stay constant depending on the altitude, latitude, time of day, or season
Success of an international science collaboration should be measured by the applicability, accuracy, and wide usage of the scientific results of the endeavor, that we presented above, and in as much as it succeeded in involving scientists from many countries worldwide including developed and developing countries, and in as much as it helped initiate multilateral science projects and provided an opportunity for emerging science programs to participate in an international program
Summary
The successful launch and operation of satellites in space, starting in the late fifties, gave us an in situ view of space conditions and initiated a technological revolution that is still ongoing. The goals and intent of the IRI project are summarized in its COSPAR/URSI Terms of Reference as follows: The Task Group was established to develop and improve a standard model of the ionospheric plasma parameters. The IRI Working Group has grown over the years to a team of 58 experts providing a balanced representation both in terms of global presence (see Fig. 1) as well as in covering the different ground and space techniques used to acquire ionospheric data. The minimum was lower and more extended than earlier minima and as a result IRI, being built with the data from earlier minima, overestimated the plasma densities during the minimum period (Luhr & Xiong 2010)
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