In real applications regarding ionospheric radio wave propagation, the community usually needs appropriate ionospheric parameters on a case by case basis, due to different methods, models, and requirements in the forecast. The kind of ‘lack of coordination’ way not only wastes resources but also degrades the application performance. In this paper we propose a new concept ‘numerical ionosphere’to describe the past, present, and future of ionospheric parameters through assimilating multiple observations into the model to solve the demand of different ionospheric parameters in various engineering applications efficiently and comprehensively.Then, we address the necessity and status of numerical ionosphere development. Finally, we focus on the main content and technical bottleneck of numerical ionosphere.

ionosphere  /  data assimilation  /  HF communication  /  BDS