Correlation between ionospheric models and space weather indices for 2011

Kurzfassung

Modelling of the ionosphere is used to mitigate ionospheric effects on single frequency satellite-receiver transmission as well as for background data input for data assimilation and for ionospheric forecasting. There are several empirical models of the ionosphere, all of them are based on different principles and using different inputs to compute electron density or Total Electron Content. However, their performance may strongly degrade especially under the disturbed conditions. The main cause of disruptions in the ionosphere is varying of solar activity which can be described by number of space weather indices. Studying how the ionospheric models react on the changes of solar-terrestrial indices is of great importance in order to signify which and how the indices should serve as inputs to the models. In this paper, we show results of comparative studies for year 2011 among different ionosphere models such as the the NeQuick 2, IRI 2012, Klobuchar model and the NTCM model considering Solar Spot Number (SSN), Solar Flux (SF), geomagnetic activity indices Ap and AE. We used SWACI data as reference to our comparisons. The correlation with SSN, SF is high while the correlation with Ap and AE is insignificant. Trend of linear regression of colerration between the reference with SNN and SF was the most similar to Klobuchar data.