On New Year's Eve 2020, the international geomagnetism and High Altitude Physics Federation (igrf) released a new generation of global geomagnetic field reference model, IGRF-13, for IAGA use worldwide. The model was calculated from 12 selected models from the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Denmark, Germany, Russia, China and other countries.

In early 2018, the Zhang Heng-1 satellite was successfully launched into orbit and operated stably in orbit, obtaining for the first time the first batch of global geomagnetic field observation data with China's full intellectual property rights. Based on the data of 19 months from the launch of the satellite to September 2019, taking into account the internal field, external field and the long-term variation of the geomagnetic field, the spherical harmonic analysis method is used, a global geomagnetic reference model CSES-IGRF 2020.0 with a maximum cut-off order of 15 is constructed. According to the evaluation of international experts, CSES-IGRF 2020.0 model meets the requirement of IGRF modeling precision, and is officially selected into IGRF-13. This model is the only global geomagnetic field model led by Chinese scientists since the IGRF began to update more than a century ago, it is also the only of the 12 selected models that did not use ESA Swarm satellite data.