The Semi-Empirical Thermosphere Model DTM2012

The Drag Temperature Model (DTM) is a semi empirical model describing the temperature, density and composition of the Earth's thermosphere, which is mainly developed for orbit computation. The total density data used in the latest version, DTM2012, includes high-resolution CHAMP and GRACE data. DTM2012 was constructed with the data used in DTM2000 as well, but with an improved algorithm. The bias and precision of the model is evaluated by comparing to the observations according to a metric, which consists of computing mean, rms and correlation. This evaluation shows that DTM2012 is the most accurate model for the data that were assimilated. Comparison to independent density data shows that it is also the most accurate model overall and a significant improvement over DTM2009 and JB2008 under all conditions.