Earth’s upper atmosphere above 500 km altitude constantly loses charged particles to outer space in a process called ionospheric outflow. This outflow is important for the dynamics of the near-Earth space environment (“space weather”) yet is poorly understood on a global scale. A mission is needed to observe the global patterns of ionospheric outflow and its relation to space weather driving conditions. The science objectives of such a mission could include not only the reconstruction of global outflow patterns but also the relation of these patterns to geomagnetic activity and the spatial and temporal nature of outflow composition. A study is presented to show that four well-placed spacecraft would be sufficient for reasonable outflow reconstructions.
Liemohn, M. W., Jörg-Micha Jahn, Raluca Ilie, Natalia Y. Ganushkina, Daniel T. Welling, Heather Elliott, Meghan Burleigh, Kaitlin Doublestein, Stephanie Colon-Rodriguez, Pauline Dredger, & Philip Valek (2024). Reconstruction analysis of global ionospheric outflow patterns. Journal of Geophysical Research Space Physics, 129, e2023JA032238. https://doi/org/10.1029/2024JA032238
There is a directory tree inside this zipped file. The main directory has the Adobe Illustrator plots of the figures in the paper, Space Weather journal manuscript # 2018SW002067, "Model evaluation guidelines for geomagnetic index predictions" by M. W. Liemohn and coauthors. The three subdirectories have the files for the individual models, the data to which they are compared, and the IDL code used to create the figure plots and metrics calculations. and Date coverage is specific to each model. The RAMSCB model covers January 2005, the WINDMI model all of 2014, and the UPOS model 1.5 solar cycles, from 1 October 2001 through 29 July 2013.
