Abstract. The Middle Atmosphere Alomar Radar System (MAARSY) on the island of Andøya in Northern Norway (69.3 • N, 16.0 • E) observes polar mesospheric summer echoes (PMSE). These echoes are used as tracers of atmospheric dynamics to investigate the horizontal wind variability at high temporal and spatial resolution. MAARSY has the capability of pulse-to-pulse beam steering allowing for systematic scanning experiments to study the horizontal structure of the backscatterers as well as to measure the radial velocities for each beam direction. Here we present a method to retrieve gravity wave parameters from these horizontally resolved radial wind variations by applying velocity azimuth display and volume velocity processing. Based on the observations a detailed comparison of the two wind analysis techniques is carried out in order to determine the zonal and meridional wind as well as to measure first-order inhomogeneities. Further, we demonstrate the possibility to resolve the horizontal wave properties, e.g., horizontal wavelength, phase velocity and propagation direction. The robustness of the estimated gravity wave parameters is tested by a simple atmospheric model.
Abstract. We present observations obtained with the Middle Atmosphere Alomar Radar System (MAARSY) to investigate short-period wave-like features using polar mesospheric summer echoes (PMSEs) as a tracer for the neutral dynamics. We conducted a multibeam experiment including 67 different beam directions during a 9-day campaign in June 2013. We identified two Kelvin–Helmholtz instability (KHI) events from the signal morphology of PMSE. The MAARSY observations are complemented by collocated meteor radar wind data to determine the mesoscale gravity wave activity and the vertical structure of the wind field above the PMSE. The KHIs occurred in a strong shear flow with Richardson numbers Ri < 0.25. In addition, we observed 15 wave-like events in our MAARSY multibeam observations applying a sophisticated decomposition of the radial velocity measurements using volume velocity processing. We retrieved the horizontal wavelength, intrinsic frequency, propagation direction, and phase speed from the horizontally resolved wind variability for 15 events. These events showed horizontal wavelengths between 20 and 40 km, vertical wavelengths between 5 and 10 km, and rather high intrinsic phase speeds between 45 and 85 m s−1 with intrinsic periods of 5–10 min.
We present measurements of the angular dependence of polar mesospheric summer echoes (PMSE) with the Middle Atmosphere Alomar Radar System in Northern Norway (69.30° N, 16.04° E). Our results are based on multireceiver and multibeam observations using beam pointing directions with off‐zenith angles up to 25° as well as on spatial correlation analysis (SCA) from vertical beam observations. We consider a beam filling effect at the upper and lower boundaries of PMSE in tilted beams, which determines the effective mean angle of arrival. Comparing the average power of the vertical beam to the oblique beams suggests that PMSE are mainly not as aspect sensitive as in contrast to previous studies. However, from SCA, times of enhanced correlation are found, indicating aspect sensitivity or a localized scattering mechanism. Our results suggest that PMSE consist of nonhomogeneous isotropic scattering and previously reported aspect sensitivity values might have been influenced by the inhomogeneous nature of PMSE.
The Middle Atmosphere Alomar Radar System (MAARSY) on the island Andøya in Northern Norway (69.3° N, 16.0° E) observes polar mesospheric summer echoes (PMSE). These echoes are used as tracers of atmospheric dynamics to investigate the horizontal wind variability at high temporal and spatial resolution. MAARSY has the capability of a pulse-to-pulse beam steering allowing for systematic scanning experiments to study the horizontal structure of the backscatterers as well as to measure the radial velocities for each beam direction. Here we present a method to retrieve gravity wave parameters from these horizontally resolved radial wind variations by applying velocity azimuth display and volume velocity processing. Based on the observations a detailed comparison of the two wind analysis techniques is carried out in order to determine the zonal and meridional wind as well as to measure first order inhomogeneities. Further, we demonstrate the possibility to resolve the horizontal wave properties, e.g. horizontal wavelength, phase velocity and propagation direction. The robustness of the estimated gravity wave parameters is tested by a simple atmospheric model
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