Toward Operational Prediction of Medium- and Small-Scale Traveling Ionospheric Disturbances Triggered by Tropospheric Weather: Results from an NRL Demonstration System

The U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) has developed a demonstration system for providing physics-based forecasts of MSTID outbreaks triggered by tropospheric weather. The system couples three (previously standalone) physics-based Navy models to provide the necessary end-to-end dynamical coupling pathways: (1) the Coupled-Ocean Atmosphere Mesoscale Prediction System (COAMPS^®); (2) new Fourier-based models of thermospheric gravity wave evolution (FGMs), and; (3) a high-resolution version of the SAMI3 physics-based ionospheric model. A novel aspect of this development is that we have now developed two different FGMs for communicating gravity-wave influences from forecast weather in COAMPS into ionospheric responses modeled by SAMI3: one based on a new space-time generalization of the Fourier-ray method, and another based on Fourier solutions to linearized gravity-wave equations containing explicit viscosity-wave and thermal-conduction-wave terms. We show results from this demonstration system in application to a large observed outbreak of MSTIDs over the US associated with deep convective thunderstorm activity in Texas.