Gravity waves observation of wind field in stratosphere based on a Rayleigh Doppler lidar

Abstract

Simultaneous wind and temperature measurements in stratosphere with high time-spatial resolution for gravity waves study are scarce. In this paper we perform wind field gravity waves cases in the stratosphere observed by a mobile Rayleigh Doppler lidar. This lidar system with both wind and temperature measurements were implemented for atmosphere gravity waves research in the altitude region 15-60 km. Observations were carried out for two periods of time: 3 months started from November 4, 2014 in Xinzhou, China (38.425°N,112.729°E) and 2 months started from October 7, 2015 in Jiuquan, China (39.741°N, 98.495°E) . The mesoscale fluctuations of the horizontal wind velocity and the two dimensional spectra analysis of these fluctuations show the presence of dominant oscillatory modes with wavelength of 4-14 km and period of around 10 hours in several cases. The simultaneous temperature observations make it possible to identify gravity wave cases from the relationships between different variables: temperature and horizontal wind. The observed cases demonstrate the Rayleigh Doppler Lidar's capacity to study gravity waves.

Inertial gravity waves observed by a Doppler wind LiDAR and their possible sources

“…The residual wind perturbations were then filtered through a Butterworth bandpass filter with cut‐off frequencies at vertical wavelengths of 7 and 20 km. The gravity wave structures seen in the wind perturbations on 10 and 12 December 2013 (not shown) are quite similar to those reported previously (Zhao RC et al, 2016, 2017). The specific gravity waves signals in the wind perturbations on 11 December were of greater interest.…”

“…The USTC Doppler wind LiDAR is integrated on a truck for mobility. More details are described in Dou XK et al (2014) and Zhao RC et al (2016). The main parameters of the system are listed in Table 1.…”

“…The horizontal wind in the 10 to ~55 km range was retrieved by accumulating raw signals for 30 minutes and shifting every 2 minutes. The corresponding vertical resolution of the wind measurements is 0.2 km below 40 km and 1.0 km above 40 km (due to low signal to noise ratio; more details can be found in Zhao RC et al (2016)). In general, the errors of the winds are 5 m/s at 60 km, 2 m/s at 50 km and less than 1 m/s at ~40 km.…”

“…In this paper, we investigate a case study of inertial gravity wave observations and their association with lower and upper stratospheric jets using the same Doppler LiDAR system described by Zhao RC et al (2016, 2017). The Doppler LiDAR system and other data used in this paper are described in Section 2.…”

Stratosphere and lower mesosphere wind observation and gravity wave activities of the wind field in China using a mobile Rayleigh Doppler lidar

“…The mobile Rayleigh Doppler wind lidar developed by the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) demonstrated its ability to measure wind and temperature from 15 km to 60 km in 2013 [Dou et al, 2014]. This system has obtained more than 100 nights of wind and temperature data during the last 3 years in three different locations of the northwest (midlatitude) [Zhao et al, 2016].…”