Identification

Title

The lower thermospheric winter-to-summer meridional circulation: 2. Impact on atomic oxygen

Abstract

As a companion study of the Part 1 (J. C. Wang et al., 2022, https://doi.org/10.1029/2022JA030948), the impact of the lower-thermospheric circulation on atomic oxygen (O) in the mesosphere and lower thermosphere (MLT) region is investigated in this Part 2 using Specified Dynamics Configuration Runs of the Whole Atmosphere Community Climate Model eXtended (SD-WACCMX) output. The asymmetry of the O profile in the summer and winter MLT region is mainly driven by local vertical advection, which is associated with the lower-thermospheric winter-to-summer circulation and middle-to-upper thermospheric summer-to-winter circulation. It is found that meridional transport and eddy diffusion only weakly modulate the O budget within this altitude range. The globally and annually averaged transport effect due to the vertical advection is quantitatively estimated. It is shown that the vertical advection is the dominant mechanism in redistributing O at altitudes between 84 and 103 km, suggesting the vertical wind can efficiently transport O between its source and sink region within the vertical column. This study demonstrates that whole atmosphere coupling on seasonal time scales is a complex interaction involving multiple underlying mechanisms within the space-atmosphere interaction region.

Resource type

document

Resource locator

Unique resource identifier

code

https://n2t.org/ark:/85065/d7m330v3

codeSpace

Dataset language

eng

Spatial reference system

code identifying the spatial reference system

Classification of spatial data and services

Topic category

geoscientificInformation

Keywords

Keyword set

keyword value

Text

originating controlled vocabulary

title

Resource Type

reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2016-01-01T00:00:00Z

Geographic location

West bounding longitude

East bounding longitude

North bounding latitude

South bounding latitude

Temporal reference

Temporal extent

Begin position

End position

Dataset reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2023-11-03T00:00:00Z

Frequency of update

Quality and validity

Lineage

Conformity

Data format

name of format

version of format

Constraints related to access and use

Constraint set

Use constraints

Copyright 2023 American Geophysical Union (AGU).

Limitations on public access

None

Responsible organisations

Responsible party

contact position

OpenSky Support

organisation name

UCAR/NCAR - Library

full postal address

PO Box 3000

Boulder

80307-3000

email address

opensky@ucar.edu

web address

http://opensky.ucar.edu/

name: homepage

responsible party role

pointOfContact

Metadata on metadata

Metadata point of contact

contact position

OpenSky Support

organisation name

UCAR/NCAR - Library

full postal address

PO Box 3000

Boulder

80307-3000

email address

opensky@ucar.edu

web address

http://opensky.ucar.edu/

name: homepage

responsible party role

pointOfContact

Metadata date

2025-07-11T15:12:58.853335

Metadata language

eng; USA