The impact of solar activity on forecasting the upper atmosphere via assimilation of electron density data

Globally abundant RO-derived Ne offers one of the most promising means to test the effect of assimilation on the model forecasted state on a global scale. This study emphasizes the importance of understanding how the assimilation results vary with solar activity, which is one of the main drivers of thermosphere-ionosphere dynamics.

This study validates the forecast states with independent RO-derived GRACE (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment mission) Ne data. The principal result of the study is that the agreement between forecast Ne and data is better during solar minimum than solar maximum. The results also show that the agreement between data and forecast is mostly better than that of the standalone TIE-GCM driven with observed geophysical indices.