Global-scale data-model comparison of the July 2nd, 2019 total solar eclipse’s thermospheric effect
- 1University of Colorado Boulder, Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, United States of America (saurav.aryal@lasp.colorado.edu)
- 2Computational Physics Inc., USA
- 3High Altitude Observatory, National Center for Atmospheric Research., Boulder, USA
- 4University of Science and Technology of China
- 5Division of Polar Climate Sciences, Korea Polar Research Institute, Incheon, Republic of Korea
- 6Kyushu University
NASA’s Global-scale Observation of Limb and Disk’s (GOLD) instrument observed the July 2, 2019 total solar eclipse’s effect in the thermosphere from a geostationary orbit above South America. GOLD’s observations of compositional and neutral temperature changes induced by the eclipse are different from the modeled effects. Combined Thermospheric Ionospheric Electrodynamics General Circulation Model (TIE-GCM) and GLobal airglOW (GLOW) modeling of GOLD’s observation is relatively successful in reproducing morphologically changes. However, the model underestimates the compositional changes. GOLD observation show a ΣO/N2 column density ratio enhancement of ~ 80 % near the totality, but the model predicts ~ 10 % enhancement. This indicates that there are inadequacies in current modeling capabilities for thermospheric changes during an eclipse. GOLD’s thermospheric measurements provide an important, new test of the models. We will present detailed data-model comparisons of measurements versus modeling results for the July 2nd eclipse.
How to cite: Aryal, S., Evans, J. S., Solomon, S. C., Burns, A. G., Correira, J., Dang, T., Lei, J., Jee, G., Liu, H., Wang, W., and Eastes, R. W.: Global-scale data-model comparison of the July 2nd, 2019 total solar eclipse’s thermospheric effect , EGU General Assembly 2020, Online, 4–8 May 2020, EGU2020-13197, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-13197, 2020.
