Seasonality of the Migrating Semidiurnal Tide in the Tropical Upper
Mesosphere and Lower Thermosphere and its Thermodynamic and Momentum
Budget
Abstract
This work uses the Specified Dynamics-Whole Atmosphere Community Climate
Model with Ionosphere/Thermosphere eXtension (SD-WACCM-X) to determine
and explain the seasonality of the migrating semidiurnal tide (SW2)
components of tropical upper mesosphere and lower thermosphere (UMLT)
temperature, zonal-wind and meridional-wind. This work also quantifies
aliasing due to SW2 in satellite-based tidal estimates. Results show
that during equinox seasons, the vertical profile of tropical UMLT
temperature SW2 and zonal wind SW2’s amplitudes have a double peak
structure while they, along with meridional wind SW2, have a single peak
structure in their amplitudes in June solstice. Hough mode
reconstruction reveals that a linear combination of 5 SW2 Hough modes
cannot fully reproduced these features. Tendency analysis reveals that
for temperature, the adiabatic term, non-linear advection term and
linear advection term are important. For the winds, the classical terms,
non-linear advection term, linear advection term and gravity wave drag
are important. Results of our alias analysis then indicate that SW2 can
induce an ~60% alias in zonal-mean and DW1 components
calculated from sampling like that of the Thermosphere Ionosphere
Mesosphere Energetics and Dynamics satellite and the Aura satellite.
This work concludes that in-situ generation by wave-wave interaction
and/or by gravity waves play significant roles in the seasonality of
tropical UMLT temperature SW2, zonal wind SW2 and meridional wind SW2.
The alias analysis further adds that one cannot simply assume SW2 in the
tropical UMLT is negligible.