Thermosphere-Ionosphere Modeling with Forecastable

Inputs of a High-Speed Stream

Geomagnetic Storm

Katrin Renyer
Instructor Name: Dr. Craig McLaughlin

Department of Aerospace Engineering

December 12, 2021

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Abstract

This paper aims to summarize, review and critique what the authors from California

Institute of Technology JPL, University of Michigan DCSSE and Catholic University of

America NASA GSFC researched and found for the paper Thermosphere-Ionosphere Modeling

with Forecastable Inputs: Case Study of the June 2012 High-Speed Stream Geomagnetic

Storm. It was assigned in AE 765 Orbital Mechanics at the University of Kansas, School of

Engineering for the purpose of more fully understanding the concept of modeling the

thermosphere and reviewing papers.

Table of Contents
Page #
Table of Contents..........................................................................................................................ii
List of Figures..............................................................................................................................iii
List of Tables...............................................................................................................................iv
1 Introduction........................................................................................................................1
2 Methodology......................................................................................................................2
3 Results and Discussion......................................................................................................2
4 Conclusions........................................................................................................................2
5 References..........................................................................................................................2

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 1 Introduction
Forecasting conditions in the thermosphere and ionosphere as a response to varying conditions

of the Sun and interplanetary space is a key component in space weather research. In the

reviewed paper, the authors performed numerical simulations using the first-principal models

Global Ionosphere-Thermosphere Model (GITM) and Thermosphere-Ionosphere

Electrodynamics General Circulation Model (TIE-GCM) to address the reliability of

thermosphere-ionospheric forecasts, which are often used to forecasting conditions in the upper

atmosphere with lead times of a few days.

2 Methodology
Research into forecasting thermospheric and ionospheric conditions can be achieved with

numerical models of the upper atmosphere, including data-assimilative models and fully

physics-based models. Data-assimilative models have been used for short-term forecasts of a

few hours. To achieve forecasts with a-few-day lead times, solar drivers that strongly influence

the thermospheric and ionospheric response to geomagnetic disturbances must be utilized.

Fortunately, fully physics-based models can accept such drivers as input and thus are ideally

used for forecasts with lead time of a few days if forecasted solar drivers are available. GITM

and TIE-GCM are driven solely by the solar wind conditions- including interplanetary

magnetic field data- measured upstream of the magnetosphere and the 10.7 cm or F10.7 solar

radio flux. We consider our model runs to be medium-range “forecastable-mode” modeling in

the sense that, were solar wind and F10.7 flux inputs available a few days ahead, the models

produce medium-range forecasts.

3 Results and Discussion

The modeling experiments from the study indicated that both the disturbed solar wind and the

enhanced solar irradiance led to the southern hemispheric overestimation of the storm time,

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which TEC response produced by forecastable-mode simulations of GITM and TIE-GCM. In

particular, the contribution from the solar wind dominates over the contribution from the solar

irradiance on the first day of the storm, while the contribution from the solar irradiance

becomes comparable to or even larger than the contribution from the solar wind on later days of

the storm. This implies that the simulated daytime TEC enhancement over the middle-to-low

latitude region is initially due to the CIR passage and then the apparent increase in modeled

solar irradiance based on the F10.7 proxy, both resulting in an overestimated TEC response

compared to the GIM data.

4 Conclusions
After performed forecastable-mode simulations with GITM and TIE-GCM, the authors found

general agreement between the models and the GIM in terms of the difference between

storm/quiet time TEC response. However, they also found overestimation of the storm time

TEC response in the middle-to-low-latitude region of the southern American sector and

surrounding areas from both models compared to the GIM. A better solar irradiance model

could improve the modeled TEC. Improvements to the existing proxy-based solar irradiance

models will lead to improved forecast accuracy of the ionospheric TEC with the physics-based

thermosphere-ionospheric models.

5 References

(1) Meng, Xing, et al. “Thermosphere‐Ionosphere Modeling with Forecastable Inputs: Case
Study of the June 2012 High‐Speed Stream Geomagnetic Storm.” Space Weather, vol.
18, no. 2, 2020, https://doi.org/10.1029/2019sw002352.

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