Trends and solar cycle effects in temperature versus altitude from the Halogen Occultation Experiment for the mesosphere and upper stratosphere

Abstract

Fourteen‐year time series of mesospheric and upper stratospheric temperature versus altitude or T(z) from the Halogen Occultation Experiment (HALOE) are analyzed and reported. The data have been binned according to 10°‐wide latitude zones from 40°S to 40°N and at 10 altitudes from 43 to 80 km: a total of 90 separate time series. Multiple linear regression analysis techniques have been applied to those time series. This study focuses on resolving their 11‐year solar cycle (SC) (or SC‐like) responses and their linear trend terms. Findings for T(z) from HALOE are compared with published results from ground‐based Rayleigh lidar and from rocketsonde measurements. SC‐like responses from HALOE compare well with those from the lidar station data. The cooling trends from HALOE also agree reasonably well with those from the lidar data at low latitudes for the concurrent decade. Cooling trends of the lower mesosphere from HALOE are not as large as those from rocketsondes and from the lidar station time series of the previous two decades, presumably because the changes in the upper stratospheric ozone are near zero during the HALOE time period and do not contribute to its trends.