International Reference Ionosphere 2007: Improvements and new parameters

The International Reference Ionosphere (IRI), a joint project of URSI and COSPAR, is the de facto international standard for the climatological specification of ionospheric parameters and as such it is currently undergoing registration as Technical Specification (TS) of the International Standardization Organization (ISO). IRI by charter and design is an empirical model based on a wide range of ground and space data. It describes monthly averages of ionospheric densities and temperatures in the altitude range 50–1500 km in the non-auroral ionosphere. Since its inception in 1969 the IRI model has been steadily improved with newer data and with better mathematical descriptions of global and temporal variation patterns. A large number of independent studies have validated the IRI model in comparisons with direct and indirect ionospheric measurements not used in the model development. A comparison with IRI is often one of the first science tasks by an ionospheric satellite or rocket team.This paper describes the latest version of the IRI model, IRI-2007, explaining the most important changes that are being introduced with this version. These include: (1) two new options for the topside electron density, (2) a new model for the topside ion composition, (3) the first-time inclusion of a model for the spread F occurrence probability, (4) a NeuralNet model for auroral E-region electron densities, (5) a model for the plasmaspheric electron temperature, and (6) the latest International Geomagnetic Reference Field (IGRF) model for the computation of magnetic coordinates including their changes due to the secular variation of the magnetic field.