CUPRI SYSTEM CONFIGURATION FOR NLC-91 AND OBSERVATIONS OF PMSE DURINGSALVO-A

The Cornell University Portable Radar Interferometer (CUPRI) provided nearly continuous monitoring of the mesosphere above Esrange, Sweden d uring the noctilucent cloud rocket and radar campaign of the summer of 1991 (NLC-91). CUPRI probed the mesosphere above Esrange from 78 to 9 1 km altitude with 300-meter resolution and was sensitive to the enhan ced Polar Mesospheric Summer Echoes (PMSE) that occur in the same alti tude range as NLC formations. Out of the total of 264 hours of CUPRI o bservation time, PMSE were present for 140 hours. Rocket Salvo A was f lown on the night of August 9-10 into an NLC event that occurred simul taneously with a thin and weakening PMSE layer. High-resolution Dopple r spectrograms of this PMSE event revealed sawtooth-like discontinuiti es at approximately 83 km altitude, which we interpret to be a distort ed partial reflection layer which was advected across the radar beam.