Trajectories of thermospheric air parcels flowing over Alaska, reconstructed from ground‐based wind measurements

DOI Web Site Web Site Web Site Web Site ほか1件をすべて表示 一部だけ表示 被引用文献3件
  • Manbharat Dhadly
    National Research Council Postdoctoral Research Associate, Space Science Division Naval Research Laboratory Washington Discrict of Columbia USA
  • Mark Conde
    Geophysical Institute University of Alaska Fairbanks Fairbanks Alaska USA

書誌事項

公開日
2017-06
権利情報
  • http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/termsAndConditions#am
  • http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/termsAndConditions#vor
DOI
  • 10.1002/2017ja024095
公開者
American Geophysical Union (AGU)

この論文をさがす

説明

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title><jats:p>It is widely presumed that the convective stability and enormous kinematic viscosity of Earth's upper thermosphere hinders development of both horizontal and vertical wind shears and other gradients. Any strong local structure (over scale sizes of several hundreds of kilometers) that might somehow form would be expected to dissipate rapidly. Air flow in such an atmosphere should be relatively simple, and transport effects only slowly disperse and mix air masses. However, our observations show that wind fields in Earth's thermosphere have much more local‐scale structure than usually predicated by current modeling techniques, at least at auroral latitudes; they complicate air parcel trajectories enormously, relative to typical expectations. For tracing air parcels, we used wind measurements of an all‐sky Scanning Doppler Fabry‐Perot interferometer and reconstructed time‐resolved two‐dimensional maps of the horizontal vector wind field to infer forward and backward air parcel trajectories over time. This is the first comprehensive study to visualize the complex motions of thermospheric air parcels carried through the actual observed local‐scale structures in the high‐latitude winds. Results show that thermospheric air parcel transport is a very difficult observational problem, because the trajectories followed are very sensitive to the detailed features of the driving wind field. To reconstruct the actual motion of a given air parcel requires wind measurements everywhere along the trajectory followed, with spatial resolutions of 100 km or less, and temporal resolutions of a few minutes or better. Understanding such transport is important, for example, in predicting the global‐scale impacts of aurorally generated composition perturbations.</jats:p>

収録刊行物

被引用文献 (3)*注記

もっと見る

問題の指摘

ページトップへ