The Canadian High Arctic Ionospheric Models

08/18/2022

Time series of electron density maps out of E-CHAIM during the September 2017 geomagnetic storm and solar energetic particle event.

Electron density at 60km, 90km, 100km, and 120km from the Empirical Canadian High Arctic Model from September 4th to September 14th, 2017. The densities incl...

11/05/2021

Chris Watson's E-CHAIM precipitation module paper is now published. Look forward to a follow-on paper with the full implementation in the module in the model.

Satellite ultraviolet imager (UVI) measurements are used to develop a precipitation component for the Empirical Canadian High Arctic Ionospheric Model for high-latitude ionosphere density Compari...

11/02/2021

New paper out examining the model's capabilities in application as a model of Total Electron Content (TEC) at high latitudes. Overall performance was very good in the polar cap and auroral oval, but converged to that of the IRI at lower latitudes. http://dx.doi.org/10.1029/2021SW002872

08/08/2021

Got the new high time resolution, SME index-based auroral module into last night. Still has some saturation at the high disturbance levels due to the limited GUVI dataset available, but it's so refreshing to have better time resolution than 1-hour and to no longer rely on AE index (which hasn't updated since February 2018...)

Electron density at 115km altitude from the Empirical Canadian High Arctic Ionospheric Model (E-CHAIM) during the September 7-8, 2017 geomagnetic storm. This...

05/22/2021

More updates incoming as we prepare a new manuscript on changes to the model since original release, like the precipitation E-region here:

Electron density in E-CHAIM during the September 2017 major geomagnetic storm.

09/01/2020

Just rolled out v3.0.0 of E-CHAIM on our website at https://e-chaim.chain-project.net/

Updates include significant (80%+) efficiency updates to the Matlab version, minor efficiency updates for all distributions, bug fixes, extension of the precipitation scheme to work using PC index when AE index isn't available (i.e. after Feb 2018), and a bunch of debugging and install testing utilities to make install smoother and debugging much easier. This update is a necessary update, meaning that previous versions (specifically their databases) will not be supported after October 1st, 2020.

The Canadian High Arctic Ionospheric Network

06/14/2020

Put in the quiet D-Region extension for this morning (Martin's FIRI2018 with some mods to get it into E-CHAIM without edges). No artifacts at the FIRI2018 upper boundary or at the FIRI2018- interface. Looks pretty seamless. Now on to performance testing.

12/18/2019

was at in force last week. Look forward to an Auroral Precipitation Module and improved solar driving, coming in March 2020! Next up is in February at the Fredericton Crowne Plaza Hotel. (Below: Example of preliminary testing of the precipitation module using Zhang and Paxton [2008] driving; an in-house driving module is under development).

06/22/2019

New paper validating E-CHAIM with DMSP and CHAMP in situ data is now published (Open Access):

Journal of Space Weather and Space Climate, a link between all the communities involved in Space Weather and in Space Climate

04/08/2019

Six months after release, E-CHAIM is now used by researchers at 40 institutions across twelve countries.

04/04/2019

As part of our scheduled update of the E-CHAIM software package, we have now removed all requirements for the user to set Environmental Variables when using the Matlab code (the C and IDL versions already do not require the setting of Environmental Variables). This update will not affect current users that already have the software successfully installed.

To access the updated software, simply login and navigate to the software portal at

The Canadian High Arctic Ionospheric Network

11/19/2018

E-CHAIM was in the local news today.