NOAA SPWC’s ionospheric and thermospheric data products – status and plans

The mission of NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) is to provide space weather products and services to stakeholders by issuing alerts, watches, and warnings. For the satellite and GNSS users, different thermosphere and ionospheric products have been developed. These ionosphere-thermosphere products are based on first-principle and data-assimilative models. To operate stable 24/7, the products have gone through long cycles of development, verification, and validation. Once in operation, products need to be continuously evaluated to assess their performance in the operational environment and identify areas of improvement. The validation was named, among others, as a need in the recently released NOAA Space Weather Advisory Group (SWAG) report.  Results of validations can guide improvements which can be addressed with the help of the research community. In addition, SWPC continuously interacts with customers to identify their needs and ensure that developed products and tools are useful and meet the requirements. In this presentation, we will describe the ionospheric and thermospheric data products provided by SWPC and the validation efforts. We will discuss plans to improve the data products / tools and expand the evaluation effort.