Gravity wave activity during stratospheric sudden warmings in the 2007–2008 Northern Hemisphere winter

Abstract

We use temperature retrievals from the Constellation Observing System for Meteorology, Ionosphere and Climate (COSMIC)/Formosa Satellite Mission 3 (FORMOSAT‐3) and Challenging Minisatellite Payload (CHAMP) Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) radio occultation profiles and independent temperature retrievals from the EOS satellite High Resolution Dynamics Limb Sounder (HIRDLS) and Sounding of the Atmosphere using Broadband Emission Radiometry (SABER) aboard the TIMED satellite to investigate stratospheric sudden warming (SSW) events and the accompanying gravity wave (GW) temperature amplitudes in the 2007–2008 Northern Hemisphere winter. We identify four SSW events (including a major one) occurring from late January to late February in 2008. We detect enhanced GW amplitudes in the stratosphere and subdued GW amplitudes in the lower mesosphere during the warming events. The timing of GW enhancement/suppression and warming/cooling events was generally close (within a couple days). We also find that stratospheric GW amplitudes were generally larger at the polar vortex edge and smaller in the vortex core and outside of the vortex and that stratospheric GW amplitudes were generally small over the North Pacific. Using a simplified GW dispersion relation and a GW ray‐tracing experiment, we demonstrate that the enhanced GW amplitudes in the stratosphere during SSWs could be explained largely by GW propagation considerations. The existence of GW critical levels (the level at which the background wind is the same as the GW phase speed) near the stratopause during SSWs would block propagation of GWs into the mesosphere and thus could lead to the observed subdued GW activity in the lower mesosphere. Since this is the first study to analyze the COSMIC and CHAMP GPS temperature retrievals up to 60 km in altitude, we compare the GPS analysis with those from HIRDLS and SABER measurements. We find that the temporal variability of zonal mean temperatures derived from the GPS data is reasonable up to ∼60 km in altitude, but the GPS data were less sensitive to SSWs than the HIRDLS and SABER data. GW analysis from GPS is consistent with HIRDLS up to ∼35 km in altitude, but it seems that the small‐scale variability at higher altitudes revealed in the GPS data is questionable.