Dy. Wang et al., EMPIRICAL-MODEL OF 90-120 KM HORIZONTAL WINDS FROM WIND-IMAGING INTERFEROMETER GREEN LINE MEASUREMENTS IN 1992-1993, JOURNAL OF GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH-ATMOSPHERES, 102(D6), 1997, pp. 6729-6745
An empirical model of horizontal winds is developed based on wind-imag
ing interferometer (WINDII) green line observations between 90 and 120
km in 1992-1993. The model includes mean winds, solar diurnal and sem
idiurnal tides, and some planetary wave components, as well as annual
and semiannual variations in these fields. Its formulation is similar
to that of HWM-90 and HWM-93 of Hedin et al. [1991,1996], but greatly
modified and extended to use the higher resolution global wind measure
ments now available from WINDII. While the technique will only reach f
ruition when results can be combined from the wind measurements of sev
eral years by the different instruments on the UARS satellite, this in
terim, but updated model provides improved representation of the tempo
ral and geographic variations of the wind fields compared to the curre
nt reference models. The model-generated climatological mean wind, diu
rnal tides, and some samples of the entire wind motion fields are pres
ented and compared with the WINDII measurements and analysis results o
btained from the data sets by different methods to check the consisten
cies between the model representations and the observations. This stud
y also reveals a dual cell structure in the meridional component of th
e diurnal, tides with two amplitude maxima centered around 95 and 102
km near 20 degrees latitude and strongly symmetric about the equator a
t equinox. Large interannual variabilities are found to exist in both
diurnal wind components with maximum amplitudes of similar to 40 and 5
5 m/s for the zonal and meridional, respectively, at the vernal equino
x of 1992.