The first 80‐hour continuous lidar campaign for simultaneous observation of mesopause region temperature and wind

Abstract

[1] The Colorado State Sodium lidar has been upgraded to a two-beam system capable of simultaneous measurement of mesopause region temperature and winds, day and night, weather permitting. This paper reports the initial result of the first campaign, conducted in April 2002, with a total of 145 hours of observation including an 80-hour continuous data acquisition of temperature and zonal wind. The contour plots of the continuous data set show considerable coherence and activities of upward propagating waves, with a maximum day-night difference of 15.5 m/s in zonal wind at 88 km and of 10 K in temperature at 92 km. Oscillations at periods of 10-hour in temperature and 16-hour in zonal wind, implicating nonlinear interactions, can be identified. Decomposition of the time series into tidal periods, resulted in very good agreement with the GSWM00 predictions of diurnal tide. The observed altitude dependence in diurnal amplitudes and phases is consistent with the presence of a significant upward propagating wave, accompanying and modulating the main diurnal tide.

Calibration and validation of the advanced E-Region Wind Interferometer

“…She et al (2003) state that their sodium lidar has a vertical resolution of 2 km and measures winds between 81 and 107 km. The wind precision is ∼ 1.5 m s −1 at the peak of the layer (∼ 91 km) and ∼ 15 m s −1 at the upper and lower bounds of their measurements for a 1 h integration during night.…”

“…These include an All-Sky Imager (ASI) (observes OH, Na, O( 1 S), O( 1 D) and N + 2 ), a spectral airglow temperature imager (SATI: O 2 , OH; Sargoytchev et al, 2004;Shepherd et al, 2010), and a meteor radar (Manson et al, 2009). The measurement cadences of the ASI and SATI are of the order of minutes, and the meteor radar provides an hourly vertical profile of horizontal wind in the mesopause region.…”

“…Progress in detector technologies have led to advances in the observation capabilities of these instruments by allowing the interference fringes and/or the scene of interest to be imaged. Apart from the Wind Imaging Interferometer (WINDII) on the Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite (Shepherd et al, 1993), publications on working instruments have generally been associated with the Fabry-Perot (Aruhliah et al, 2010;Anderson et al, 2012;Shiokawa et al, 2012) and spatial heterodyne spectroscopy (SHS) techniques (the Doppler Asymmetric Spatial Heterodyne -DASH -of Englert et al, 2012). The success of these instruments demonstrates how incorporating imaging capabilities improves the accuracy and temporal resolution over earlier configurations.…”

The Techniques and Progress of Wind and Temperature Lidar in WIPM

“…The metal resonance fluorescence lidar is employed to observe the mesosphere and lower thermosphere, since the effective cross-section of the metal atoms in the mesopause is several orders of magnitude larger than that of the Rayleigh scattering [8][9][10]. The sodium lidar is one of the most popular metal resonance fluorescence lidars due to its high population and large cross section [11,12]. The Rayleigh lidar, Raman lidar and potassium resonance fluorescence lidar were combined to observe the whole profile of the atmospheric temperature from 1 to 105 km [13].…”

Sodium fluorescence Doppler lidar to measure atmospheric temperature in the mesopause region

“…Thereafter, Colorado State University developed a three-frequency so-dium fluorescence Doppler lidar system employing the laser stabilization technique and the frequency modulation technique to simultaneously measure wind and temperature [7,18]. In 2002, the Colorado State University sodium fluorescence Doppler lidar system was upgraded to a two-beam system to realize simultaneous atmospheric temperature and wind measurements [19]. In 2006, this lidar system was upgraded to a three-beam system to provide measurements of the atmospheric momentum flux as well as the atmospheric temperature and wind [20].…”