A Collaborative Investigation of Short-Period Gravity Wave Climatology in the Antarctic Mesosphere

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

This project will, jointly with the British Antarctic Survey, construct and deploy an all-sky airglow imager at the BAS Halley Bay station. This instrument will provide data on mesospheric temperatures and gravity wave structure in a larger effort to quantify the coupling between the geospace environment and the Earth's neutral atmosphere. Gravity waves, particularly small-scale, short-period waves, are known to play an important role in the transfer of energy between their lower altitude source regions and the mesosphere. Their occurrence and characteristics at high latitudes have however not yet been observed and examined at the level of detail that will be possible under this project. It is timely because it will coincide with the launch of NASA's TIMED satellite (Thermosphere/Ionosphere/Mesosphere Energetics and Dynamics), a small remote sensing and imaging spacecraft. The satellite, together with ground-based observations, will achieve a quantitative understanding of the energetics and dynamics of the mesosphere and lower thermosphere-ionosphere between altitudes of ~50 and 200 km. This is a transition region where temperature variations are large and increase dramatically with altitude, and where atmospheric motions are dominated by gravity waves and tides.