| Summary: | Photochemistry can significantly affect the ionospheric status. Adopting a comprehensive photochemical scheme with 60 reactions, primarily based on the recent systematic study of ion chemistry by Richards in 2011, we revised the open-source SAMI2 (Sami2 is another model of the ionosphere) model to SAMI2<sub>−</sub>ph. The scheme includes both ground state and metastable/vibrational excited compositions (e.g., N(<sup>2</sup>D), N<sub>2</sub>(ν), and O<sub>2</sub>(ν)) and associated reactions, which can remarkably affect the ionospheric electron density. The model accuracy is tested using the most widely used ionospheric data foF2 derived from mid-latitude ionosonde stations. The correlation coefficients are larger for SAMI2<sub>−</sub>ph than for SAMI2. In addition, the linear slope k is significantly closer to 1 than the default run for the NmF2 comparisons. The smaller RMSE and <i>b</i> indicate that the modified model provides a reasonably good match with the ionosonde NmF2 measurements. The above results demonstrate that the model with the chosen photochemical scheme performs better than the original SAMI2 at mid-latitude.
|
|---|