Abstract
Abstract. When the Committee on Space Research (COSPAR) initiated the International Reference Ionosphere (IRI) project in 1968 it wisely selected K. Rawer as its first Chairperson. With a solid footing and good contacts in both the ground-based and space-based ionospheric communities he was ideally suited to pull together colleagues and data from both communities to help build the first version of the IRI. He assembled a team of 20+ international ionospheric experts in the IRI Working Group and chaired and directed the group from 1968 to 1984. The working group has now grown to 63 members and the IRI model has undergone many revisions as new data became available and new modeling techniques were applied. This paper was presented during a special session of the Kleinheubach Tagung 2013 in honor of K. Rawer's 100th birthday. It will review the current status of the IRI model and project and the international recognition it has achieved. It is quite fitting that this year we not only celebrate K. Rawer's 100th birthday but also the exciting news that his favorite science endeavor, IRI, has been internationally recognized as an ISO (International Standardization Organization) standard. The IRI homepage is at http://irimodel.org.
Highlights
The International Reference Ionosphere (IRI) is a joint project of the Committee on Space Research (COSPAR) and the International Union of Radio Science (URSI) with its goals well described in its Terms of Reference as follows: “The Task Group was established to develop and improve a standard model of the ionospheric plasma parameters
He succeeded to get URSI to concur in the project and making IRI a joint project of the prime international unions involved in ionospheric physics
With this latest version IRI for the first time will include a representation of auroral oval boundaries based on the work of Zhang and Paxton (2008) with observations from the Global Ultraviolet Imager (GUVI) of the Thermosphere Ionosphere Mesosphere Energetics and Dynamics (TIMED) satellite
Summary
The International Reference Ionosphere (IRI) is a joint project of the Committee on Space Research (COSPAR) and the International Union of Radio Science (URSI) with its goals well described in its Terms of Reference as follows: “The Task Group was established to develop and improve a standard model of the ionospheric plasma parameters. With a solid footing and good contacts in both the ground-based and space-based ionospheric communities he was ideally suited to pull together colleagues and data from both communities to help build the first version of the model. He succeeded to get URSI to concur in the project and making IRI a joint project of the prime international unions involved in ionospheric physics. He convinced 20+ international ionospheric experts to join him in the IRI Working Group and chaired and directed the group from 1968 to 1984.
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
