STI Seminar: Tuesday 7 March 2023 at 2:30 pm (CET)

[STI Secretariat]

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STI seminar
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You are most cordially invited to a hybrid seminar organized by the ICTP 
Science Technology and Innovation Unit (STI Unit)

** * * Tuesday, 7 March 2023 at 14:30 (Rome/CET time) *** * **

IN PERSON: Stasi Seminar Room (Leonardo Building, second floor)

VIRTUAL: register in advance 
at:https://zoom.us/meeting/register/tJEocOmqrjwjHdTyN3de6NX5lPuYAioC22gO<https://zoom.us/meeting/register/tJEocOmqrjwjHdTyN3de6NX5lPuYAioC22gO>/
/After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing 
information about joining the seminar.

Speaker: *Alessio PIGNALBERI, *Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e 
Vulcanologia (INGV), Rome, Italy

Title:***Modelling the topside ionosphere: improving NeQuick through 
radio occultation data *

_Abstract:_The topside ionosphere is the region of the upper atmosphere 
extending from the F2-layer peak to the plasmasphere. This is the 
environment where low-Earth-orbit satellites live, and it also highly 
affects the propagation of GNSS signals. Hence, its description has 
gained more and more importance in the last years. However, the 
modelling of the electron density distribution in this region represents 
still a challenge for the ionospheric community. This presentation 
describes novel methodologies developed to improve the NeQuick model 
topside ionosphere formulation by taking advantage of electron density 
observations by radio occultation. The NeQuick topside formulation is 
mathematically inverted to derive a fully analytical expression of the 
topside effective scale height, which is then used to optimize the 
NeQuick topside parameters. Through a large dataset of radio occultation 
observations, we highlighted the main spatial, diurnal, seasonal, solar 
and magnetic activity variations of the NeQuick topside parameters, and 
provided a first application for topside ionosphere modelling.

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_Bio_: Alessio Pignalberi obtained the PhD degree in Geophysics from the 
University of Bologna in 2019, and from 2019 onwards he is post-doctoral 
fellow at the Italian National Institute of Geophysics and Vulcanology 
(INGV) in Rome. Since his PhD, he is deeply involved in the field of 
ionosphere modelling by improving empirical climatological models like 
the International Reference Ionosphere (IRI) and NeQuick. He is the main 
author of the IRI UP data assimilation method, and most of his research 
activity is currently devoted to the modelling of the topside 
ionosphere. He was awarded with the International Union of Radio Science 
(URSI) Young Scientist Award in 2017 and 2021.


-- 
Nicoletta Ivanissevich (Ms.)
Secretariat,
STI - Science, Technology and Innovation Unit
The Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics
Strada Costiera, 11
I-34151 Trieste
Italy

Phone: +39-040-2240.383
STI Webpage:https://www.ictp.it/research/sti.aspx
Email:sti at ictp.it

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