ICON observations of longitudinal variations from 95 km to the spacecraft altitude of 575 km

NASA's Ionospheric Connection Explorer (ICON) was launched in October 2019 during the solar minimum between Solar Cycles 24 and 25. The science data products are now available ( https://icon.ssl.berkeley.edu/Data ). ICON is equipped with instruments that target the neutral drivers of the ionospheric dynamo and measure the response of the ionosphere to the neutral and external plasma drivers. I n the altitude range between 95 km and 300 km, Michelson Interferometer for Global High-resolution Thermospheric Imaging (MIGHTI) provides measurements on neutral wind and temperature by remote sensing techniques. At the ICON spacecraft altitude, ~575 km, Ion Velocity Meter (IVM) measures the in-situ plasma parameters. EUV and FUV spectrographs provide the retrieved O⁺ density from 200 km to the ICON orbit altitude in the daytime and nighttime, respectively. In addition, the daytime O-N₂ ratio derived from EUV measurements also reveals the dynamics of the upper atmosphere. In the altitude range from 250 km to 300 km, ICON provides simultaneous measurements of O⁺ density and neutral wind at both daytime and nighttime, which allow to connect the observations of the neutral atmosphere below and the ionosphere above. In this study, we present the observed longitudinal variations in fixed local times of different parameters measured by all 4 instruments onboard ICON, connecting the wave patterns in the mesospheric and lower thermospheric neutral winds to the in-situ ion density at the ICON spacecraft altitude. Our preliminary results show that the same wave patterns that are found in the ion density at the altitude of ICON's orbit can also be found in the neutral zonal wind as low as 130 km, whereas the same wave pattern in the neutral meridional wind only starts from ~150 km. In order to interpret the interaction between different parameters measured by ICON, a TIEGCM run is performed to support the observations.