[P-EM13] Coupling Processes in the Atmosphere-Ionosphere System

[PEM13-15] New Observations of Atmosphere-Ionosphere Coupling by the Ionospheric Connection Explorer

★Invited Papers

*Thomas J Immel¹, Brian Harding¹, Colin Triplett¹, Jeffrey Forbes², Maosheng He³, Jonathan Makela⁵, Scott England⁶, Yen-Jung Wu¹, Stephen Mende¹, Harald Frey¹, Christoph Englert⁴, Roderick Heelis⁷ (1.University of California Berkeley, 2.University of Colorado, 3.Leibniz-Institute of Atmospheric Physics, 4.U.S. Naval Research Laboratory , 5.University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 6.Virginia Polytechnic University, 7.University of Texas at Dallas)

Keywords:thermosphere, ionosphere, atmospheric physics

The NASA ICON mission was launched in October 2019 to investigate how the space environment is modified by inputs of energy and momentum from the lower and middle atmosphere. To do this, ICON measures the wind and temperature at the boundary of space and higher, while simultaneously measuring the conditions in the ionosphere and thermosphere above including constituent velocities and composition. A number of remarkable findings can now be discussed, including the rapid variability and strong localized shears in thermospheric winds, the electrodynamic influences of the neutral wind on the ionosphere, and the multitude of atmospheric waves observed that in many cases are quite unexpected. Further, the high sensitivity of the thermosphere to variations in auroral inputs during this solar minimum must also be discussed as we approach a new solar maximum. The unpredictable nature of the ionosphere-thermosphere system is now open to new investigations and exploration with the dataset provided by ICON.