ED53B-3485 Online Chapmann Layer Calculator for Simulating the Ionosphere with Undergraduate and Graduate Students 

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Paul Withers

    Pa
    Friday, December 19, 201401:40 PM - 06:00 PM
        Moscone South
        Poster Hall

The Chapman Layer Model is a "textbook" model of the ionosphere (for example, "Theory of Planetary Atmospheres" by Chamberlain and Hunten, Academic Press (1978)). The model use fundamental assumptions about the neutral atmosphere, the flux of ionizing radiation, and the recombination rate to calculation the ionization rate, and ion/electron density for a single species atmosphere. We have developed a “Chapman Layer Calculator” application that is deployed on the web using Java. It allows the user to see how various parameters control ion density, peak height, and profile of the ionospheric layer. Users can adjust parameters relevant to thermosphere scale height (temperature, gravitational acceleration, molecular weight, neutral atmosphere density) and to Extreme Ultraviolet solar flux (reference EUV, distance from the Sun, and solar Zenith Angle) and then see how the layer changes. This allows the user to simulate the ionosphere on other planets, by adjusting to the appropriate parameters. This simulation has been used as an exploratory activity for the NASA/LWS - Heliophysics Summer School 2014 and has an accompanying activity guide.

    Authors
        Nicholas Gross
            Boston University 
    Paul Withers
        Boston University 
    Jan Sojka
        Utah State University 

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    Session: Games, Interactive Simulations, and Virtual Labs for Science Teaching and Learning II Posters
    Section/Focus Group: Education 

    Day: Friday, December 19, 2014