Identification

Title

Challenges to understanding the Earth's ionosphere and thermosphere

Abstract

We discuss, in a limited way, some of the challenges to advancing our understanding and description of the coupled plasma and neutral gas that make up the ionosphere and thermosphere (I-T). The I-T is strongly influenced by wave motions of the neutral atmosphere from the lower atmosphere and is coupled to the magnetosphere, which supplies energetic particle precipitation and field-aligned currents at high latitudes. The resulting plasma dynamics are associated with currents generated by solar heating and upward propagating waves, by heating from energetic particles and electromagnetic energy from the magnetosphere and by the closure of the field-aligned currents applied at high latitudes. These three contributors to the current are functions of position, magnetic activity, and other variables that must be unraveled to understand how the I-T responds to coupling from the surrounding regions of geospace. We have captured the challenges to this understanding in four major themes associated with coupling to the lower atmosphere, the generation and flow of currents within the I-T region, the coupling to the magnetosphere, and the response of the I-T region reflected in the neutral and plasma density changes. Addressing these challenges requires advances in observing the neutral density, composition, and velocity and simultaneous observations of the plasma density and motions as well as the particles and field-aligned current describing the magnetospheric energy inputs. Additionally, our modeling capability must advance to include better descriptions of the processes affecting the I-T region and incorporate coupling to below and above at smaller spatial and temporal scales.

Resource type

document

Resource locator

Unique resource identifier

code

http://n2t.net/ark:/85065/d7m048qz

codeSpace

Dataset language

eng

Spatial reference system

code identifying the spatial reference system

Classification of spatial data and services

Topic category

geoscientificInformation

Keywords

Keyword set

keyword value

Text

originating controlled vocabulary

title

Resource Type

reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2016-01-01T00:00:00Z

Geographic location

West bounding longitude

East bounding longitude

North bounding latitude

South bounding latitude

Temporal reference

Temporal extent

Begin position

End position

Dataset reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2020-07-22T00:00:00Z

Frequency of update

Quality and validity

Lineage

Conformity

Data format

name of format

version of format

Constraints related to access and use

Constraint set

Use constraints

Limitations on public access

None

Responsible organisations

Responsible party

contact position

OpenSky Support

organisation name

UCAR/NCAR - Library

full postal address

PO Box 3000

Boulder

80307-3000

email address

opensky@ucar.edu

web address

http://opensky.ucar.edu/

name: homepage

responsible party role

pointOfContact

Metadata on metadata

Metadata point of contact