Abstract:

Na lidar, meteor radar and medium frequency (MF) radar are three of the most significant techniques in measuring mesospheric horizontal wind fields and have been extensively used nowadays. All the three instruments coexist at Hawaii from 2002 to 2005, when simultaneous observations were operated for many nights. The horizontal winds observations as long as 8 hours at two nights of July 9, 2002 and October 23, 2003 were chosen and anaylized to study the differences of the three techniques. It is found that the wind amplitudes observed by Na lidar and meteor radar are agreeable with each other normally, but are both much larger than MF radar observations. The vertical variations of the nightly mean wind observations show that the three instruments could obtain consistent (evidently discrepant) wind observations when the wind amplitudes and the corresponding shear are weak (strong).

Key words: atmospheric optics, mesopause horizontal wind, Na lidar, meteor radar, MF radar