Short Time-Scale Enhancements to the Global Thermosphere Temperature and Nitric Oxide Content Resulting From Ionospheric Joule Heating

Abstract:

The total Joule heating in the polar ionosphere can be derived from an empirical model of the electric fields and currents, using input measurements of the solar wind velocity and interplanetary magnetic field (IMF). In the thermosphere, measurements of the neutral density from accelerometers on the CHAMP and GRACE satellites are used to derive exospheric temperatures, showing that enhanced ionospheric energy dissipation produces elevated temperatures with little delay.

Using the total ionospheric heating, changes in the global mean exosphere temperature as a function of time can be calculated with a simple differential equation. The results compare very well with the CHAMP and GRACE measurement. A critical part of the calculation is the rate at which the thermosphere cools after the ionospheric heating is reduced. It had been noted previously that events with significant levels of heating subsequently cool at a faster rate, and this cooling was attributed to enhanced nitric oxide emissions. This correlation with nitric oxide has been confirmed with very high correlations with measurements of nitric oxide emissions in the thermosphere, from the Sounding of the Atmosphere using Broadband Emission Radiometry (SABER) instrument on the Thermosphere Ionosphere Mesosphere Energetics and Dynamics (TIMED) satellite. These measurements were used in a recent improvement in the equations that calculate the thermosphere temperature. The global nitric oxide cooling rates are included in this calculation, and the predicted levels of nitric oxide, derived from the ionosphere heating model, match the SABER measurements very well, having correlation coefficients on the order of 0.9.

These calculations are used to govern the sorting of measurements CHAMP and GRACE measurements, on the basis of the global temperature enhancements due to Joule heating, as well as various solar indices, and season. Global maps of the exospheric temperature are produced from these sorted data.