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

The Earth\u27s 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