Evaluating Sensitivities of the MSIS-86 Thermosphere Model.

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Abstract

Atmospheric models represent the state of the environment including interactions that occur in the atmosphere and are thus useful to predict future temperature and concentration densities of important species. A prominent example of an atmospheric model, in particular for the thermosphere, is the MSIS-86 model developed at NASA. In this note, we transform this computer program by means of the automatic differentiation tool ADIFOR to obtain a new computer program capable of evaluating the derivatives of the output of MSIS-86 with respect to its input. These sensitivities are quantified and compared with derivatives computed via numerical differentiation by divided differencing, demonstrating the reliability of automatic differentiation.