SA13A-2315
Does Weak Turbulence Impact PMSEs’ Strengths Closer To The Northern Pole?
Monday, 14 December 2015
Poster Hall (Moscone South)
Nimalan Swarnalingam1, Wayne K Hocking2 and Diego Janches1, (1)NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, United States, (2)University of Western Ontario, London, ON, Canada
Abstract:
Existing 51.0 MHz VHF radar at Eureka (80N, 86W) in northern Canada is located closer to both the northern magnetic and geomagnetic poles. A recent calibrated study of Polar Mesosphere Summer Echoes (PMSE) using this radar supports the previous results by other radars that the absolute signal strength of PMSE in this region is relatively weak compared with the radar observations located at high latitudes. Although very cold temperature and existence of charged ice particles are the most important ingredient required for PMSE to appear, several other factors could potentially influence the absolute signal strengths of these echoes. One of them is neutral air turbulence. Previous studies indicate that upper mesospheric turbulence’s strength decreases with latitudes, especially in the very high latitudes [Becker, 2004; Lubken et. al., 2009]. In this study, we investigate long-term mesospheric turbulence strengths at Eureka and study how they could be associated with the weak PMSE signal strengths compared with other high latitude conditions, where PMSE are strong.
