Exploring Where Earth's Weather Meets Space Weather

The Ionospheric Connection Explorer (ICON), the newest addition to NASA’s fleet of Heliophysics satellites, launched on October 10, 2019 at 9:59 p.m. EDT. Led by UC Berkeley, scientists and engineers around the world came together to make ICON a reality.

The goal of the ICON mission is to understand the tug-of-war between Earth’s atmosphere and the space environment. In the "no mans land" of the ionosphere, a continuous struggle between solar forcing and Earth’s weather systems drive extreme and unpredicted variability. ICON will investigate the forces at play in the near-space environment, leading the way in understanding disturbances that can lead to severe interference with communications and GPS signals.

Mission Operations News

Mission Operations News

ICON Temperatures Updated to Version 6, Now Available

Colin Triplett 0 139

The MIGHTI temperature product (L2.3) has been updated to version 6 (v06) and is currently available for the full mission on the ICON FTP site and at SPDF. 

With this version update, the MIGHTI-A and MIGHTI-B temperature data are both more rigorously tested to ensure continuity across the solar terminator. Also, the top of the daytime MIGHTI-A temperature profiles is now 135 km, up from 127 km in previous versions. Links to the data products are provided here:

ICON FTP MIGHTI

CDAWeb MIGHTI-A

CDAWeb MIGHTI-B

Prior to using these data, please review the data product documentation here:

ICON FTP Temperature V06 Documentation

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Latest News

News

El Niño has effects all the way to the edge of the atmosphere.

Claire Raftery 0 9930
-- December 16, 2015

The warm El Niño conditions affecting weather around the Pacific Ocean are also affecting conditions in space, according to University of California, Berkeley scientists.

El Niño is commonly observed as a global change in rainfall due to changes in temperature in the Pacific Ocean. However, UC Berkeley scientists report today at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco that the processes that lead to increased precipitation are also driving unexpected changes in the ionosphere, the uppermost level of the atmosphere.

The findings (AGU abstract #SA31F-2383) will be presented by Dr. Thomas Immel, and are based on calculations by Dr. Astrid Maute of the High Altitude Observatory in Boulder, Colorado.

“We expected that we would see some changes in the ionosphere when we started this study” says Dr. Immel, a Senior Fellow at UC Berkeley’s Space Sciences Laboratory, “but we were shocked at how strong the effect has turned out to be”.
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ICON skin is based on Greytness by Adammer
Background image, courtesy of NASA, is a derivitave of photograph taken by D. Pettit from the ISS, used under Creative Commons license