The NCAR TIEGCM is a time dependent, three-dimensional model of the thermosphere and ionosphere that solves the fully coupled, nonlinear, hydrodynamic, thermodynamic, and continuity equations of the neutral gas self-consistently with the ion energy, ion momentum, and ion continuity equations using a finite differencing scheme for spatial and temporal variations (Roble et al., 1988, Richmond et al., 1992). It has 25 constant-pressure levels in the vertical extending from approximately 97 km to 500 km in altitude and a 5o x 5o degree latitude and longitude grid in its base configuration.
This movie shows the change in electron density computed by TIEGCM as simualtion time advances. You may see rendering artifacts in this animation. These are a result of the video compression that YouTube uses and not part of the original data. The high-resolution version does not have these artifacts. Click here to download a high-resolution version of this movie