The vibrationally excited molecular nitrogen effects by numarical modelling of the ionospheric F2-layer behaviour during major magnetic storms

In the work the authors have investigated how the variations of the F2-layer electron density and temperature numerically calculated for the period of April 15-20, 2002 including two geomagnetic storms depend on the О+ + N2 reaction rate taking into account the vibrationally excited molecular nitrogen. The results of numerical calculations performed using the Upper Atmosphere Model have been compared with the observation data obtained by the incoherent scatter radars. The conclusion has been made that ignoring the vibrationally excited molecular nitrogen by the numerical calculations worsens the agreement of model versions both with the observation data and with each other.