A numerical modeling study of the interaction between the tides and the circulation forced by high‐latitude plasma convection

Abstract

A spectral, time‐varying thermospheric general circulation model has been used to study the nonlinear interaction at high latitudes between the tides propagating into the thermosphere from below and the circulation induced by magnetospheric forcing and in situ solar heating. The model is discrete in the vertical with 27 layers spaced by half a scale height. In the horizontal, the fields are expanded in a series of spherical harmonics using a triangular truncation at wave number 31, equivalent to a homogeneous global resolution with a minimum wavelength of 1270 km. A hypothetical uniform grid point model would require a horizontal spacing of 417 km to describe the same minimum wavelength. In the high‐latitude F region the tides affect the dusk vortex of the neutral flow very little, but the dawn vortex is either suppressed or amplified dependent upon the universal time and tidal phase. In the E region neutral flow, both the dusk and dawn vortices are shifted in local time by the tides, again as a function of universal time and tidal phase. At dusk a nonlinear amplification of the sunward winds occurs for certain combinations of parameters, and at dawn the winds may be completely suppressed. Below 120 km altitude the magnetospheric forcing creates a single cyclonic vortex which is also sensitive to the high‐latitude tidal structure.