Abstract
Abstract. Meteor wind data from the first year of operation of the Falkland Islands SuperDARN radar (52° S, 59° W) are used to characterize the atmospheric tides and background winds in the upper mesosphere above the South Atlantic. Strong (>40 m s−1) semidiurnal tides are observed in the winter time and large amplitude (>60 m s−1) bursts of quasi two-day wave activity are seen in January 2011. Data are in good agreement with those presented from the SAAMER meteor radar (54° S, 68° W). Comparison with SuperDARN meteor wind data from a geographically similar Northern Hemisphere site at Goose Bay (53° N 60° W) reveal clear interhemispheric differences especially in the semidiurnal and terdiurnal components of the tides. The winter time amplitudes of the tides are much stronger in the Southern Hemisphere than in the north. Background winds are observed to be significantly more polewards and westwards throughout the year than those predicted by the empirical horizontal wind model HWM07.
Highlights
The dynamics of the middle atmosphere is dominated by waves with periods ranging from minutes to years and spatial scales of metres to thousands of kilometres, and the complex interaction between these different oscillations drives the large scale winds in the middle atmosphere (e.g. Fritts and Alexander, 2003; Manson et al, 2003; Fritts et al, 2006; Offermann et al, 2009; Hoffmann et al, 2010)
In this paper we report on the first year of observations from the SuperDARN Falkland Islands radar (FIR) on the dynamics of the upper mesosphere above the South Atlantic
We compare our results with those derived from the SAAMER meteor radar at Tierra del Fuego (Fritts et al, 2010), higher latitude Southern Hemisphere observations, the horizontal wind model HWM-07 (Drob et al, 2008) and data recorded from a Northern Hemisphere SuperDARN radar of nearly identical latitude and longitude at Goose Bay in Canada
Summary
The dynamics of the middle atmosphere is dominated by waves with periods ranging from minutes to years and spatial scales of metres to thousands of kilometres, and the complex interaction between these different oscillations drives the large scale winds in the middle atmosphere (e.g. Fritts and Alexander, 2003; Manson et al, 2003; Fritts et al, 2006; Offermann et al, 2009; Hoffmann et al, 2010). A wealth of ground-based observational data on the dynamics of the middle atmosphere has been recorded from Northern Hemisphere mid-latitude sites in Canada, North America, Europe and Japan Relatively little ground-based data has been reported from equivalent latitudes in the Southern Hemisphere (Brown et al, 1995; Fritts et al, 2010) with the majority of Southern Hemisphere observations coming from lower latitude tropical and extratropical sites (e.g. Pancheva, 2006; Buriti et al, 2008; Andrioli et al, 2009; Guo and Lehmacher, 2009; Lima et al, 2005, 2006; Malinga and Poole, 2002; Kovalam and Vincent, 2003) and high latitude Antarctic stations We compare our results with those derived from the SAAMER meteor radar at Tierra del Fuego (Fritts et al, 2010), higher latitude Southern Hemisphere observations, the horizontal wind model HWM-07 (Drob et al, 2008) and data recorded from a Northern Hemisphere SuperDARN radar of nearly identical latitude and longitude at Goose Bay in Canada
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