Abstract
The Fabry–Pérot interferometer (FPI) and meteor radar are two important techniques for measuring the horizontal wind field in mesopause region, the observations of which still lack comprehensive comparison. Kunming Observatory (25.6°N,103.8°E) has deployed both instruments in recent years and provides collocated meteor radar and FPI observations. The meteor radar measures the horizontal wind fields over 24 hours every day continuously, whereas the FPI can only work during the night with clear air condition. FPI horizontal wind data from the 892.0-nm airglow emission (with a peak height at ~87 km) from 26 January to 8 February 2019 were comparatively analyzed with simultaneous meteor radar observations, which cover the range between 80 and 90 km with a vertical resolution of 1.8 km. It was found that the temporal variations in the horizontal wind fields observed by the FPI and meteor radar were generally consistent with one another, with the highest 2-D correlation coefficients of 0.91 (0.88) at 88 (87) km for the meridional (zonal) wind, which agreed with the peak height of OH airglow emission observed by the TIMED/SABER instrument. In addition, the correlation coefficient for the weighted meteor radar horizontal wind by OH concentration between 86 and 88 km and 85 and 89 km increased slightly from 0.91 (0.89) to 0.92 (0.89) for the meridional (zonal) wind, which indicated the contribution of OH concentration beyond the peak height to the FPI wind observations. We also found that the absolute horizontal wind values detected by two instruments were linearly correlated with a slope of ~1.3 for both wind components, and meteor radar wind observations were usually larger than the FPI observations.
Highlights
The mesosphere and lower thermosphere (MLT) region lies between 60 and 140 km above the Earth, where many atmospheric waves amplify and break [1]
The horizontal wind observations from meteor radar are extensively utilized in the study of dynamics in the MLT region between 80 and 100 km
Meteor radars in Mohe, Beijing, and Wuhan were utilized to study the quasi-10-day waves (Q10DW) in the MLT area during the SSW in February 2018 [13], and the authors found that the enhancement of Q10DW was intimately related to the SSW event
Summary
The mesosphere and lower thermosphere (MLT) region lies between 60 and 140 km above the Earth, where many atmospheric waves amplify and break [1]. We compared the neutral wind data observed by an FPI at a low-latitude location (25.6◦ N,103.8◦ E) with that simultaneously measured by a collocated meteor radar, which contributes to the previous works performed for the high-latitude King Sejong Station (62.22◦ S 58.79◦ W) [20,21] and mid-latitude Kelan Station (38.7◦ N, 111.6◦ E) [18,19] FPI observations. Both the temporal variations and the absolute values between these two instruments were comparatively investigated.
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