Description

Beneficiary: Since its creation in 1969, the Université Toulouse III Paul Sabatier (PIC n°999851169) has been expanding its offer of multidisciplinary education in the fields of science, health, engineering, technology and sports, developing one of the most important scientific research clusters in France. Centred on Toulouse, European space and aeronautics capital, UPS is a renowned European university with a global outlook. With almost 35000 registered students, UPS is one of the leading French universities, in the quality of its teaching, the breadth of its scientific research and the number of students it attracts. As one of the top research establishments in France, counting 2500 teachers and teachers-researchers divided up into 68 laboratories, UPS is active in public research at the highest level. As such, it participates in numerous research and development projects at regional, national and international level. Recognised across Europe and all over the world, UPS research laboratories function in a scientific research context that works both with the core disciplines, and transversal scientific applications, sharing the results of their work to increase productivity in core research and encourage knowledge transfer.

Institute: IRAP is a joint research unit (JRU n°5277) of Université Toulouse III - Paul Sabatier (UPS) and the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in which both entities put together staff and resources for the benefit of the laboratory, following agreements signed between them. Since personnel employed by CNRS within this laboratory will participate to the project, the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (PIC n°999997930) will act as third party linked to UPS following the definition of Article 14 of the Grant Agreement. This will allow CNRS to declare its personnel costs.

The ionosphere team belongs to the Planets, Environments and Space Plasmas (PEPS) group of the Institute for Research in Astrophysics and Planetology (IRAP). The PEPS group is deeply involved in a large set of current and future space missions dedicated to the exploration of the terrestrial spatial environment (Cluster, Swarm, MMS, Daedalus). The PEPS group is also in charge of the Centre de Données de la Physique des Plasmas (CDPP, Plasma Physics Data Centre, http://cdpp.eu/), one of the largest space plasma database in Europe, which develops a large set of online tools (AMDA, 3DView) primarily dedicated to space data; these tools are currently being extended to ionospheric data. The IRAP ionosphere team included in the PEPS group has a leading role in national and EC projects for ionosphere and electrodynamics modelling for scientific purpose and space weather applications. The Transplanet website (http://transplanet.irap.omp.eu/) hosted by CDPP is the first European online access for run-on-request of a first principle ionosphere model called IPIM in a planet-independent version. The team is also in charge of the SuperDARN Kerguelen radar and as such has access to the data of all the radars of the consortium for generating global ionospheric convection maps in both hemispheres.

In the PITHIA project, the IRAP ionosphere team will be mainly involved in the training (WP2), the Dissemination, Exploitation and Communication (WP3), the PITHIA-NRF e-science center (WP5), the Deploying Interoperable Components (WP6) and the Transnational access activities (WP7).

More specifically, through the operation of the UPS node, the IRAP ionosphere team will make available run-on-request of the IPIM model for 4 planets of the Solar System. The IPIM model is developed in the IRAP ionosphere team and a new version of the model for the Earth will be made available through the UPS node for more operational purposes. As such, important outputs, such as densities, convection, precipitation, conductivities and ion productions over large terrestrial coverage will be provided and will be fed with solar wind inputs coming from AMDA-CDPP. Moreover, the convection SuperDARN data and the outputs of the Transplanet online model will be registered in the e-science center.