Frequency spectra of horizontal winds in the mesosphere and lower thermosphere region from multistatic specular meteor radar observations during the SIMONe 2018 campaign

Abstract

In recent years, multistatic specular meteor radars (SMRs) have been introduced to study the Mesosphere and Lower Thermosphere (MLT) dynamics with increasing spatial and temporal resolution. SMRs, compared to other ground-based observations, have the advantage of continuously measuring the region between 80 and 100 km independent of weather, season, or time of day. In this paper, frequency spectra of MLT horizontal winds are explored through observations from a campaign using the SIMONe (Spread-spectrum Interferometric Multistatic meteor radar Observing Network) approach conducted in northern Germany in 2018 (hereafter SIMONe 2018). The 7-day SIMONe 2018 comprised of fourteen multistatic SMR links and allows us to build a substantial database of specular meteor trail events, collecting more than one hundred thousand detections per day within a geographic area of $$\sim$$ ∼ 500 km $$\times$$ × 500 km. We have implemented two methods to obtain the frequency spectra of the horizontal wind components: (1) Mean Wind Estimation (MWE) and (2) Wind field Correlation Function Inversion (WCFI), which utilizes the mean and the covariances of the line of sight velocities, respectively. Monte Carlo simulations of a gravity wave spectral model were implemented to validate and compare both methods. The simulation analyses suggest that the WCFI helps us to capture the energy of smaller scale wind fluctuations than those capture with MWE. Characterization of the spectral slope of the horizontal wind at different MLT altitudes has been conducted on the SIMONe 2018, and it provides evidence that gravity waves with periods smaller than 7 h and greater than 2 h dominate with horizontal structures significantly larger than 500 km. In the future, these analyses can be extended to understand the significance of small-scale fluctuations in the MLT, which were not possible with conventional MWE methods. Graphical Abstract

Validation of Multistatic Meteor Radar Analysis Using Modeled Mesospheric Dynamics: An Assessment of the Reliability of Gradients and Vertical Velocities

“…Results from this campaign were later used in Charuvil Asokan et al. (2021); Vargas et al. (2021); Vierinen et al.…”

“…Six of them were existing pulsed systems, and the remaining eight links were implemented with coded continuous wave transmissions with MIMO technology (refer to Charuvil Asokan et al. (2021) for more details about SIMONe 2018).…”

“…The vertical wind spectrum also showed a peak around the 24-hr period. Note that the WCFI spectrum does not use any functional form for the horizontal or vertical winds (Charuvil Asokan et al, 2021;Vierinen et al, 2019). Since two independent analyses (i.e., the gradient approach and the WCFI method) showed a diurnal pattern in the vertical velocity, we looked into other multistatic systems such as SIMONe Argentina (50°S) and SIMONe Peru (12°S).…”

“…Charuvil Asokan et al. (2021) focused on the frequency spectral studies of horizontal wind components using the Wind‐field Correlation Function Inversion (WCFI) method described in Vierinen et al. (2019).…”

“…The vertical wind spectrum also showed a peak around the 24‐hr period. Note that the WCFI spectrum does not use any functional form for the horizontal or vertical winds (Charuvil Asokan et al., 2021; Vierinen et al., 2019).…”