The Seasonal Variation of the Propagating Diurnal Tide in the Mesosphere and Lower Thermosphere. Part II: The Role of Tidal Heating and Zonal Mean Winds

Abstract

A linear mechanistic tidal model is used to understand the mechanisms responsible for the seasonal variation of the propagating diurnal tide in the mesosphere and lower thermosphere simulated in the Canadian Middle Atmosphere Model (CMAM). The linear model uses a spectral approach to represent the horizontal structure of the tidal perturbations and employs dissipative processes that do not depend on season. By constraining the model with the zonal mean zonal winds, zonal mean temperatures, and tidal heating from the CMAM, the relative role of each of these terms is assessed. The linear model is able to reproduce all of the important tidal features found in the CMAM, in particular the semiannual amplitude variation in the lower thermosphere at low latitudes that is seen in observations. From this analysis the effects of both heating and mean winds are found to be responsible for the seasonal variation of the tidal amplitude, while variations in the tidal phase are attributed solely to changes in the mean winds. The strong sensitivity of the tide to the mean winds is the novel result of this study. This sensitivity is attributed to latitudinal shears in the zonal mean easterlies in the summer mesosphere. Although these shears occur on an annual basis, their impact on tidal amplitudes in the lower thermosphere is semiannual as a result of the 6-month shift in seasons between the two hemispheres. Simulations using observational datasets from the Committee on Space Research (COSPAR) International Reference Atmosphere (CIRA) and the High Resolution Doppler Imager (HRDI) reveal significant differences in the resulting tidal structure from that obtained using the CMAM winds, and point to possible deficiencies in these datasets.