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Abstract

The International Reference Ionosphere (IRI) model is recognized as the official standard for Earth's ionosphere by the International Standardization Organization, the International Union of Radio Science, the Committee on Space Research, and the European Cooperation for Space Standardization. As requested by these organizations, IRI is an empirical model representing the primary ionospheric parameters based on the long data record that exists from ground and space observations of the ionosphere. The core model describes monthly averages of the electron density, electron temperature, ion temperature, and ion composition globally in the altitude range from 60 to 2,000 km. Over time additional parameters were added in response to community requests, this includes the equatorial ion drift, the occurrence probability of spread-F, auroral boundaries and the electron content from the bottom of the ionosphere to a user-specified altitude. We will present the latest version of the model, which includes several improvements and new models for the ion temperature, the ion drift, the D-region electron density, and the electron density in the topside and plasmasphere. A special focus in recent years has been on assimilative methods to bring IRI predictions closer to real-time conditions with the help of measured parameters. An overview of these methods will be provided and we will discuss the future plans for the IRI model. A comprehensive description of the model was recently published in Reviews of Geophysics (Bilitza et al., doi:10.1029/2022RG000792) providing a deeper understanding of the model architecture, its scientific background and its mathematical formalism.