SA13A-2309
Concentric Gravity Waves over Northern China Observed by a No-Gap OH Airglow Imager Network and Satellites
Monday, 14 December 2015
Poster Hall (Moscone South)
Jiyao Xu1, Qinzeng Li1, Jia Yue2, Lars Hoffmann3, William C. Straka4, Steven D Miller5, Wei Yuan1 and Xiao Liu6, (1)National Space Science Center, Beijing, China, (2)Hampton University, Hampton, VA, United States, (3)Forschungszentrum Juelich, Juelich, Germany, (4)University of Wisconsin Madison, Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies, Madison, WI, United States, (5)Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere, Fort Collins, CO, United States, (6)Henan Normal University, Xinxiang, China
Abstract:
The first no-gap OH airglow all-sky imager network in the world was established in northern China in February 2012. The network is composed of 6 all-sky airglow imagers that make observations of OH airglow gravity waves and cover an area of about 2000 km east and west and about 1400 km south and north. A comparison of the observations in 2012, 2013, and 2014 are made, which shows that there were more strong thunderstorms take place in 2013 in the northern China and produce more Concentric Gravity Wave (CGW) events. Especially, a series of CGW events were observed by the network nearly every night during the first half of August 2013. These events were also observed by satellite sensors from FY-2, AIRS/Aqua, and VIIRS/Suomi NPP. Combination of the ground imager network with satellites provides multi-level observations of the CGWs from the stratosphere to the mesopause region. In this talk, two representative CGW events in August 2013 are studied in detail and movies of the two events are displayed. One is the CGW on the night of 13 August 2013, likely launched by a single thunderstorm. The temporal and spatial analyses indicate that the CGW horizontal wavelengths agree with the GW dispersion relation within 300 km from the storm center. A gravity wave with horizontal wavelength of about 20 km propagates horizontally to more than 800 km in the mesopause region, probably due to a ducting layer. Another CGW event was induced by two very strong thunderstorms on 09 August 2013. Multi-scale waves with horizontal wavelengths ranging from less than 10 km to 200 km were observed. Many ripples were found, probably due to the breaking of strong gravity waves with large relative OH intensity perturbations of 10%.
