NEDM and its potential use to improve IRI model for topside ionosphere and plasmasphere

Abstract

Neustrelitz Electron Density Model (NEDM2020) [1] is developed for supporting space weather services and mitigation of propagation errors for trans-ionospheric signals. NEDM2020 is composed of a dedicated plasmasphere model called Neustrelitz Plasmasphere Model (NPSM) [2] and separate Chapman layer functions for ionospheric F and E-layer distributions and provide 3D electron density distribution up to about 20,000 km altitude. We will present comparisons of mean electron density variations derived from NEDM2020, NeQuick2 and IRI-2016 (or IRI-2020) models with respect to reference electron density datasets from ICON’s Ion Velocity Meter (IVM), DMSP’s Faraday scintillation cup, Swarm’s Langmuir Probes (LP) and Van Allen Probes’s Radiation Belt Storm Probes (RBSP) instruments. Our limited investigation shows that NEDM2020 performs better than NeQuick2 and IRI when compared with the in-situ datasets from IVM and RBSP instruments (see Figure 1 below). When compared with Swarm’s LP datasets all three models perform very similarly.