Abstract
Abstract. During the ECOMA/MASS rocket campaign large scale NLC/PMC was observed by satellite, lidar and camera from polar to mid latitudes. We examine the observations from different instruments to investigate the morphology of the cloud. Satellite observations show a planetary wave 2 structure. Lidar observations from Kühlungsborn (54° N), Esrange (68° N) and ALOMAR (69° N) show a highly dynamic NLC layer. Under favorable solar illumination the cloud is also observable by ground-based cameras. The cloud was detected by cameras from Trondheim (63° N), Juliusruh (55° N) and Kühlungsborn. We investigate planetary scale morphology and local scale gravity wave structures, important for the interpretation of the small scale rocket soundings. We compare in detail the lidar observations with the NLC structure observed by the camera in Trondheim. The ALOMAR RMR-lidar observed only a faint NLC during the ECOMA launch window, while the camera in Trondheim showed a strong NLC display in the direction of ALOMAR. Using the high resolution camera observations (t~30 s, Δx<5 km) and the wind information from the meteor radar at ALOMAR we investigate the formation and destruction of NLC structures. We observe that the NLC brightness is reduced by a factor of 20–40 within 100 s which can be caused by a temperature about 15 K above the frostpoint temperature. A horizontal temperature gradient of more than 3 K/km is estimated.
Highlights
Noctilucent clouds (NLC), called Polar Mesospheric Clouds (PMC) when observed from space, allow a detailed study of the atmosphere at altitudes close to the mesopause where remote sensing is challenging (e.g. Thomas, 1984)
As the results by Fiedler et al (2009) are based on a combined dataset from several years of NLC measurements we show in Fig. 1 the daily averaged occurrence frequency (OF) of the year 2007 as observed by SCIAMACHY (Robert et al, 2009)
To investigate the vertical structure of the PMC on planetary scales we show in Fig. 4 the vertically resolved PMC ice mass from SOFIE measurements
Summary
Noctilucent clouds (NLC), called Polar Mesospheric Clouds (PMC) when observed from space, allow a detailed study of the atmosphere at altitudes close to the mesopause where remote sensing is challenging (e.g. Thomas, 1984). Noctilucent clouds (NLC), called Polar Mesospheric Clouds (PMC) when observed from space, allow a detailed study of the atmosphere at altitudes close to the mesopause where remote sensing is challenging From 1 August to 15 August 2007 there was a combined rocket campaign to launch the MASS and the ECOMA payloads. During the first salvo noctilucent clouds were observed by camera and lidar from ground at three different locations from nearby the launch site to about 1700 km south. On 3 August 2007, two rockets were launched, the first one was the MASS payload which penetrated the NLC layer at about 22:53 UT and the second one the ECOMA payload at about 23:23 UT (Robertson et al, 2009; Rapp et al, 2009). We present results from several space-based instruments observing PMC in the UV and the IR spectral range, ground based camera, lidar and radar instruments.
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