The International Reference Ionosphere: Rawer's IRI and its status today

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.

Assimilation of GNSS Measurements for Estimation of High‐Latitude Convection Processes

“…The IRI provides a model of Earth's ion and electron temperatures (Bilitza, 2014). The inputs to this model include only the location in geographic coordinates and UT time of interest.…”

“…Though not in the original formulation of EMPIRE (Datta-Barua et al, 2009), we have inserted 𝜂 as a scale factor to lessen the impact of the model on EMPIRE corrections in the topside ionosphere. The ion and electron temperatures T i , T e for these terms are computed using the International Reference Ionosphere (IRI 2007) (Bilitza, 2014), plasma densities N are from the measurement data directly (in this case outputs from IDA4D), and neutral density and temperature are from the Naval Research Laboratory Mass Spectrometer Incoherent Scatter (NRL-MSISE00) model (Picone et al, 2002).…”

Imprint of Storm Enhanced Density in Ground‐Based OI 630.0 nm Dayglow Measurements

“…By providing the height dependent plasma and neutral densities, the VER 630.0 is calculated. For neutral gas profiles in the thermosphere, GLOW model uses the Naval Research Laboratory Mass Spectrometer Incoherent Scatter (NRLMSIS‐00) atmosphere (Picone et al., 2002) as inputs, whereas the International Reference Ionosphere (IRI‐90) (Bilitza, 1990) model for the ionospheric electron and ion densities and electron/ion temperatures.…”

Vector Spherical Harmonics for Data‐Assimilative Neutral Wind Estimation

“…The velocity due to gravity is represented by the $${\vec{v}}_{g,0}$$ term and lastly $${\vec{v}}_{\mathit{dfsn,0}}$$ is the diffusion contribution. To calculate these we use the ion and electron temperatures obtained from the IRI 2007 model (Bilitza, 2014) and the neutral density and temperature which are obtained from the Naval Research Laboratory Mass Spectrometer Incoherent Scatter (NRL‐MSISE00) model (Picone et al., 2002).…”