Local Time Dependence of Polar Mesospheric Clouds: A model study

Abstract

Abstract.The Mesospheric Ice Microphysics And tranSport model (MIMAS) is used to study local time (LT) variations of polar mesospheric clouds (PMC) in the northern hemisphere during the period from 1979 to 2013. We investigate the tidal behavior of brightness, altitude and occurrence frequency and find a good agreement between model and lidar observations. Mean ice water content (IWC) values from MIMAS also match those from satellite observations. In the latitudinal band of 67.5

Solar and lunar tides in noctilucent clouds as determined by ground-based lidar

“…NLC variability during solar day was also investigated by models (e.g., Stevens et al, 2010Stevens et al, , 2017Schmidt et al, 2017). In general, maximum values for occurrence and brightness are found in the first half of the solar day, which is attributed to temperature tides and tidal variations in background water vapor.…”

“…Fig. 1 in Fiedler et al (2017)) with 15 a high occurrence of dim clouds. As a result, the application of our long-term brightness limit (β max > 4×10 Such distinct variations throughout the solar day were first observed 1997 at ALOMAR and have been found by groundbased lidar at other locations as well (e.g., von Zahn et al, 1998;Chu et al, 2001;Fiedler et al, 2005;Gerding et al, 2013).…”