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Seasonality of the Migrating Semidiurnal Tide in the Tropical Upper Mesosphere and Lower Thermosphere and its Thermodynamic and Momentum Budget
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  • Cornelius Csar Jude Salinas,
  • Dong Wu,
  • Jae N Lee,
  • Loren Chang,
  • Liying Qian,
  • Han-Li Liu
Cornelius Csar Jude Salinas
National Central University
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Dong Wu
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
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Jae N Lee
University of Maryland
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Loren Chang
National Central University

Corresponding Author:[email protected]

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Liying Qian
NCAR HAO
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Han-Li Liu
National Center for Atmospheric Research
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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.