The International Community Coordinated Modeling Center Space Weather Modeling Capabilities Assessment: Overview of Ionosphere/Thermosphere Activities

The Earth's ionosphere/thermosphere (I/T) system exhibits complicated weather variability that can have adverse effects on human operations and systems, and consequently, there is a need for both accurate and reliable specifications and forecasts for this region. As part of the international effort to evaluate and assess the predictive capabilities of space weather models, four working groups for the I/T system have been created with the goal to devise a concerted model validation effort for the I/T environment. This paper presents an overview of the team efforts and reports on the progress made. As a first step, the working teams have selected to limit the validation efforts to critical I/T parameters that include total electron content, the peak density and height of the ionospheric F region, ionospheric scintillations, and thermospheric neutral densities. As part of this effort, initial lists of participating models and events have been constructed and validation data sets have been identified. In the future appropriate metrics will be selected for the various user and scientific needs. Plain Language Summary The Earth's upper atmosphere exhibits weather variability that can have adverse effects on human operations and systems, and consequently, there is a need for both accurate and reliable weather forecasts for this region. The effects of this variability on technological systems can be divided into two general categories. The first category relates to radio wave signals that are subject to propagation effects as they travel through the upper atmosphere and the second effect is related to atmospheric drag, which changes the orbits of satellites. Recently, an international effort to evaluate and assess the predictive capabilities of weather models for the upper atmosphere was formed. An overview of this effort and initial results is described.