Neethal Thomas

and 4 more

We have carried out a statistical study of neutral atmospheric parameters in the mesosphere lower thermosphere (MLT) region, by utilizing simultaneous measurements from the EISCAT VHF radar and sodium LIDAR collocated at  Tromsø , Norway. This study focuses on the incoherent scatter (IS) spectral width, which is a function of the ion-neutral collision frequency, ion temperature, (equal to neutral temperatures in the D-region), and ion mass. Using the neutral temperatures obtained from LIDAR, and ion mass estimated using a chemistry model, we have measured the ion-neutral collision frequency in the 80-100 km altitudes by fitting the spectral width. The study shows that the current widely used formulae underestimate the ion-neutral collision frequency on average by 1.53\(\pm\)0.24 in comparison to the measurements. Also, the measured collision frequencies showed large temporal variations due to neutral density fluctuations, indicating the presence of atmospheric waves. The amplitudes of these waves are found to be as large as 50% of the background densities. This suggests that individual spectral width measurements are likely influenced by these random neutral density fluctuations, which can have a significant impact on the IS temperature fits. In addition, for altitudes below 85 km, the ion mass increases drastically indicating the presence of heavy cluster ions. The dominance of heavy ions makes it further challenging to extract the temperature values from the spectral width at these altitudes. In light of these observations, the inherent limitations of inferring temperatures from IS spectral width in the MLT altitudes are studied.