First ever cross comparison of thermospheric wind measured by narrow‐ and wide‐field optical Doppler spectroscopy

Abstract

AbstractWe present the first ever cross comparisons of F region horizontal neutral wind measurements taken using two different types of optical Doppler spectrometer: all‐sky scanning Doppler imagers (SDI) and narrow‐field Fabry‐Perot interferometers (NFPIs). Horizontal neutral winds were inferred using bistatic observations from three NFPIs, together with monostatic and bistatic observations from two SDIs. All instruments were located in Alaska. Cross comparisons were made for a total of seven nights in January and February 2010. The results show a high degree of correlation between the diurnal behaviors of the line‐of‐sight (LOS) winds measured by both instruments. The SDI and NFPI LOS wind time series also often contained high‐frequency fluctuations with similar overall characteristics, strongly suggesting that these fluctuations were geophysical in origin. However, the amplitude of the high‐frequency component was stronger in the NFPI LOS wind than in the SDI data. Even the smallest SDI angular resolution element is much larger than the NFPI field of view, suggesting that its relative insensitivity to high frequencies is because these fluctuations are associated with local‐scale structures whose spatial extent is smaller than ∼40 km spanned by the smallest SDI viewing field. Upon fitting vectors to the LOS wind data, close agreement was found between the wind components estimated by the two types of instrument. Discrepancies that did arise occurred most often when the neutral wind speed was weak, suggesting that conditions capable of driving higher neutral wind speeds also suppressed the development of small‐scale structures in the thermospheric neutral wind fields.