On pyFIRI implementation: non-disturbed non-auroral ionospheric D-Region model for the Python ecosystem

Many ionospheric studies require the global state of the Earth’s ionosphere D-Region. It is valuable for HF-band radio-waves propagation problems and as the lower boundary and/or initial conditions for the numerical modeling. A robust D-Region model is also required as the reference state that may be used for data interpretation, assimilation, to fill missed values, or as a convenient representation of observations. The existing trend of Python scientific infrastructure application for the ionosphere and space weather modeling triggers the need for a D-Region model for the Python ecosystem.

FIRI-2018 is a mature model of the Earth’s non-auroral non-disturbed ionospheric D-Region. It is the successor of FT-2001, a model included into IRI-2016, which is the de-facto standard model of the Earth’s ionosphere. To an end-user, the FIRI-2018 model was provided by Friedrich et al. (2018, https://doi.org/10.1029/2018JA025437 ) as a set of pre-calculated reference electron density profiles for the Northern Hemisphere. pyFIRI (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.softx.2021.100885) is the Python3 package built on top of those reference profiles. Our presentation aims to describe the principal features of the pyFIRI package and to highlight our preliminary results on FIRI-2018 extrapolation to the Southern Hemisphere.

Acknowledgement. Authors are grateful to Dr. Martin Friedrich for the fruitful discussion and detailed consulting on the FIRI-2018 model. We acknowledge Dr. Martin Friedrich, Dr. Klaus Torkar, and Christoph Pock for making FIRI-2018 data freely available, and for kind permission to adopt these data for the pyFIRI package. Without this, the pyFIRI package would not be possible to develop.