Characteristics of mesospheric gravity waves near the magnetic equator, Brazil, during the SpreadFEx campaign

Abstract

Abstract. As part of the SpreadFEx campaign, coordinated optical and radio measurements were made from Brazil to investigate the occurrence and properties of equatorial Spread F, and to characterize the regional mesospheric gravity wave field. All-sky image measurements were made from two sites: Brasilia and Cariri located ∼10 • S of the magnetic equator and separated by ∼1500 km. In particular, the observations from Brasilia provided key data in relatively close proximity to expected convective sources of the gravity waves. High-quality image measurements of the mesospheric OH emission and the thermospheric OI (630 nm) emission were made during two consecutive new moon periods (22 September to 9 November 2005) providing extensive data on the occurrence and properties of F-region depletions and regional measurements of the dominant gravity wave characteristics at each site.A total of 120 wave displays were observed, comprising 94 short-period events and 26 medium-scale gravity waves. The characteristics of the small-scale waves agreed well with previous gravity wave studies from Brazil and other sites. However, significant differences in the wave propagation headings indicate dissimilar source regions for the Brasilia and Cariri datasets. The observed medium-scale gravity wave events constitute an important new dataset to study their mesospheric properties at equatorial latitudes. These data exhibited similar propagation headings to the shortperiod events, suggesting they originated from the same source regions. Medium-scale waves are generally less susceptible to wind filtering effects and modeling studies utilizing these data have successfully identified localized regions

Gravity wave amplitudes and momentum fluxes inferred from OH airglow intensities and meteor radar winds during SpreadFEx

“…Other assessments of gravity wave parameters have been made by Taylor et al (2009) during SpreadFEx, while Vadas et al (2009) have performed calculations of momentum fluxes, amplitudes and wave parameters for monochromatic GW events during the campaign. Their method was based in estimate GW properties of individual and prominent wave events present in the airglow images.…”

Reconstruction of the gravity wave field from convective plumes via ray tracing

“…16 were used in Vadas et al (2009a) to compare theoretical estimates with the observed amplitudes of the six medium-scale waves observed by Taylor et al (2008) in the OH layer, in order to constrain this theory. We first converted the measured intensity amplitudes to horizontal velocity amplitudes.…”

Atmospheric wave induced O<sub>2</sub> and OH airglow intensity variations: effect of vertical wavelength and damping

“…Among several techniques, radio frequency and optical measurements, airglow observations using a photometer and all-sky imagers have been effectively used. (Hecht et al, 1987;Taylor et al, 1991Taylor et al, , 2009Takahashi et al, 1992;Taori and Taylor, 2006). Airglow OH and O 2 emissions provide useful information on the variation of the hydrogen-oxygen chemistry and the temperature field.…”