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Nitric Oxide Concentrations during Solar Maximum and Solar Minimum Years Derived from SABER

Presentation #128.01 in the session Drivers and Dynamics of the Coupled Ionosphere-thermosphere-mesosphere-atmosphere System — Poster Session.

Published onOct 20, 2022
Nitric Oxide Concentrations during Solar Maximum and Solar Minimum Years Derived from SABER

Nitric oxide (NO) is of particular importance in the upper atmosphere between 100 km and 250 km, as it plays the role in cooling and regulating the energy budget of the system. The NO cooling rates have been routinely derived for the past 20 years from the measurements made by Sounding of the Atmosphere using Broadband Emission Radiometry (SABER) instrument on the Thermosphere Ionosphere Mesosphere Energetics and Dynamics satellite (TIMED) satellite since 2002. However, the global long-term dataset of thermospheric NO concentration as a function of local time, to our best knowledge, is a blank space. Since the NO abundance is almost entirely solar-driven on timescales from days to decades, understanding the behavior of the NO concentration during solar storm and solar cycle will greatly improve the storm-time and climatological knowledge of thermospheric energy balance.

In this work, we derived the NO concentration with the newly derived NO cooling rates and the neutral kinetic temperature and atomic oxygen number density simulated by the MSIS 2.0 model. We also compare the SABER derived NO concentration with the SD-WACCM simulations during both solar maximum year (2014) and solar minimum year (2009), and found that, above ~130 km, the global mean of SABER derived NO concentration matches the SD-WACCM simulations well (less than 10% difference with respect to the SD-WACCM simulation) during both 2009 and 2014. The difference between SABER NO and SD-WACCM NO is smaller during solar maximum year than during solar minimum year.

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