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Meteor radar vertical wind observation biases and mathematical debiasing strategies including the 3DVAR+DIV algorithm

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posted on 2023-05-26, 15:54 authored by Gunter Stober, Alan Liu, Alexander Kozlovsky, Zishun Qiao, Ales Kuchar, Christoph Jacobi, Chris Meek, Diego Janches, Guiping Liu, Masaki Tsutsumi, Njal Gulbrandsen, Satonori Nozawa, Mark Lester, Evgenia Belova, Johan Kero, Nicholas Mitchell
Abstract. Meteor radars have become widely used instruments to study atmospheric dynamics, particularly in the 70 to 110 km altitude region. These systems have been proven to provide reliable and continuous measurements of horizontal winds in the mesosphere and lower thermosphere. Recently, there have been many attempts to utilize specular and/or transverse scatter meteor measurements to estimate vertical winds and vertical wind variability. In this study we investigate potential biases in vertical wind estimation that are intrinsic to the meteor radar observation geometry and scattering mechanism, and we introduce a mathematical debiasing process to mitigate them. This process makes use of a spatiotemporal Laplace filter, which is based on a generalized Tikhonov regularization. Vertical winds obtained from this retrieval algorithm are compared to UA-ICON model data. This comparison reveals good agreement in the statistical moments of the vertical velocity distributions. Furthermore, we present the first observational indications of a forward scatter wind bias. It appears to be caused by the scattering center's apparent motion along the meteor trajectory when the meteoric plasma column is drifted by the wind. The hypothesis is tested by a radiant mapping of two meteor showers. Finally, we introduce a new retrieval algorithm providing a physically and mathematically sound solution to derive vertical winds and wind variability from multistatic meteor radar networks such as the Nordic Meteor Radar Cluster (NORDIC) and the Chilean Observation Network De meteOr Radars (CONDOR). The new retrieval is called 3DVAR+DIV and includes additional diagnostics such as the horizontal divergence and relative vorticity to ensure a physically consistent solution for all 3D winds in spatially resolved domains. Based on this new algorithm we obtained vertical velocities in the range of w = ± 1–2 m s−1 for most of the analyzed data during 2 years of collection, which is consistent with the values reported from general circulation models (GCMs) for this timescale and spatial resolution.

Funding

This research has been supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF, grant no. 1828589), the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (grant no. JA 836/43-1), the NASA Heliophysics ISFM program, NASA NESC assessment TI-17-01204, the NASA Meteoroid Environment Office (grant no. 80NSSC18M0046), the STFC (grant no. ST/S000429/1), and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS, Grants-inAid for Scientific Research, grant no. 17H02968).

History

Citation

Stober, G., Liu, A., Kozlovsky, A., Qiao, Z., Kuchar, A., Jacobi, C., Meek, C., Janches, D., Liu, G., Tsutsumi, M., Gulbrandsen, N., Nozawa, S., Lester, M., Belova, E., Kero, J., and Mitchell, N.: Meteor radar vertical wind observation biases and mathematical debiasing strategies including the 3DVAR+DIV algorithm, Atmos. Meas. Tech., 15, 5769–5792, https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-15-5769-2022, 2022.

Author affiliation

Department of Physics and Astronomy

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Published in

ATMOSPHERIC MEASUREMENT TECHNIQUES

Volume

15

Pagination

5769 - 5792

Publisher

COPERNICUS GESELLSCHAFT MBH

issn

1867-1381

eissn

1867-8548

Acceptance date

2022-09-15

Copyright date

2022

Available date

2023-05-26

Language

English

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