Deducing non-migrating diurnal tides in the middle thermosphere with
GOLD observations of the Earth's far ultraviolet dayglow from
geostationary orbit
Abstract
The Global-scale Observations of the Limb and Disk (GOLD) Mission images
middle thermosphere temperature and the vertical column density ratio of
oxygen to molecular nitrogen (ΣO/N2) using its far ultraviolet imaging
spectrographs in geostationary orbit. Since GOLD only measures these
quantities during daylight, and only over the ~140º of
longitude visible from geostationary orbit, previously developed tidal
analysis techniques cannot be applied to the GOLD dataset. This paper
presents a novel approach that deduces two specified non-migrating
diurnal tides using simultaneous measurements of temperature and ΣO/N2.
DE3 (diurnal eastward propagating wave 3) and DE2 (diurnal eastward
propagating wave 2) during October 2018 and January 2020 are the focus
of this paper. Sensitivity analyses using TIE-GCM simulations reveal
that our approach reliably retrieves the true phases, whereas residual
contributions from tides assumed to be absent, the restriction in
longitude, and random uncertainty can lead to ~ 50%
error in the retrieved amplitudes. Application of our approach to GOLD
data during these time periods provides the first observations of
non-migrating diurnal tides in measurements taken from geostationary
orbit. We identify discrepancies between GOLD observations and TIE-GCM
modeling. Retrieved tidal amplitudes from GOLD observations exceed their
respective TIE-GCM amplitudes by a factor of two in some cases.