The open time-series of the high-resolution ionosphere-thermosphere aeronomic climate simulation (OTHITACS)

Abstract

The OTHITACS project aims to provide a continuous high-resolution simulation of the Earth's ionosphere and thermosphere from 1 January 2000. The ionosphere and thermosphere are important regions of our near-Earth space environment. A better understanding of these regions is useful not only for socio-economic reasons, including the management of space assets, but also for other far-reaching consequences of space weather.

In the experiment, "the physics-based TIE-GCM OTHITACS", we run the thermosphere-ionosphere-electrodynamics general circulation model (TIE-GCM; http://www.hao.ucar.edu/modeling/tgcm) at high resolution using the computing and data resources provided by the Kratos HPDA (high-performance data analysis) cluster at the German Aerospace Center (DLR). We provide 38 diagnostics of the ionosphere-thermosphere system at a cadence of 10 minutes. These diagnostics describe the dominant plasma and neutral structures and the electrodynamics of the ionosphere-thermosphere system.

We are making this unprecedented data set freely available to the aeronomy community to improve climate studies. Some of the phenomena that could be studied with this data set include ionospheric plasma density variability, neutral composition trends, neutral winds, ion drift velocity, equatorial anomaly, and travelling ionospheric/atmospheric disturbances.