Radar observations of winds, waves and tides  in the mesosphere and lower thermosphere  over South Georgia island (54°&thinsp;S, 36°&thinsp;W) and  comparison with WACCM simulations

Hindley, Neil P.; Mitchell, Nicholas J.; Cobbett, Neil; Smith, Anne K.; Fritts, Dave C.; Janches, Diego; Wright, Corwin J.; Moffat-Griffin, Tracy

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-22-9435-2022

Articles | Volume 22, issue 14

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-22-9435-2022

© Author(s) 2022. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-22-9435-2022

© Author(s) 2022. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 22, issue 14

Research article

|

22 Jul 2022

Research article |

| 22 Jul 2022

Radar observations of winds, waves and tides in the mesosphere and lower thermosphere over South Georgia island (54° S, 36° W) and comparison with WACCM simulations

Neil P. Hindley, Nicholas J. Mitchell, Neil Cobbett, Anne K. Smith, Dave C. Fritts, Diego Janches, Corwin J. Wright, and Tracy Moffat-Griffin

Supplement

https://doi.org/10.5194/acp-22-9435-2022-supplement

Data sets

University of Bath: King Edward Point Skiymet meteor radar data (2016–2020) N. J. Mitchell https://doi.org/10.5285/061fc7fd1ca940e7ad685daf146db08f

MLS/Aura Level 2 Temperature V005 M. Schwartz, N. Livesey, and W. Read https://doi.org/10.5067/AURA/MLS/DATA2520

NCAR CESM2-WACCM model output prepared for CMIP6 CMIP amip (https://catalogue.ceda.ac.uk/uuid/c592c08ed77640f3859447e090ec7db9) G. Danabasoglu https://doi.org/10.22033/ESGF/CMIP6.10041

Model code and software

nhindley/acp-2021-981: Analysis and Figure code for ACP publication acp-2021-981 Hindley et al., (2022) N. P. Hindley https://doi.org/10.5281/ZENODO.6819061

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Short summary

We present observations of winds in the mesosphere and lower thermosphere (MLT) from a recently installed meteor radar on the remote island of South Georgia (54° S, 36° W). We characterise mean winds, tides, planetary waves, and gravity waves in the MLT at this location and compare our measured winds with a leading climate model. We find that the observed wintertime winds are unexpectedly reversed from model predictions, probably because of missing impacts of secondary gravity waves in the model.