Online data base of satellite sounder and insitu measurements covering two solar cycles Original Research Article

Accurate descriptions of the solar cycle variations of ionospheric parameters are an important goal of ionospheric modeling. Reliable predictions of these variations are of essential importance for almost all applications of ionospheric models. Unfortunately there are very few global data sources that cover a solar cycle or more. In an effort to expand the solar cycle coverage of data readily available for ionospheric modeling, we have processed a large number of satellite data sets from the sixties, seventies, and early eighties and have made them online accessible as part of NSSDCʹs ftp archive (http://nssdcftp.gsfc.nasa.gov/spacecraft data/) and itʹs ATMOWeb retrieval and plotting system (http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/atmoweb/). We report about two data restoration efforts supported through NASAʹs Applied Information Systems Research Program (AISRP). The first project deals with insitu data from a large number of US, Canadian, Japanese and German satellites that measured ionospheric densities and temperatures from 1964 to 1983. The accumulated data base includes data from the BE-B, DME-A, AE-B, Alouette 2, ISIS 1, 2, OGO-6, AEROS A, AE-C, -D, -E, Hinotori, ISS-b and DE-2 satellite missions. The second project involves the production of digital topside sounder ionograms from the ISIS 1 and 2 satellites and their subsequent inversion to produce electron-density profiles. Approximately 340,000 ionograms are available from NSSDC as of July 2002. An automatic topside ionogram scaler with true height algorithm (TOPIST) was developed as part of this project and is now being used to obtain electron density profiles from these ionograms. Providing global coverage over more than two solar cycles the database established by this two projects is a valuable asset for improvements of the International Reference Ionosphere model and for ionospheric research.