Identification

Title

Investigation of the variability of night‐time equatorial thermospheric winds over Nigeria, West Africa

Abstract

This study examined the variability of the night-time equatorial thermospheric meridional and zonal wind speeds using an optical Fabry-Perot interferometer (FPI) located in Abuja, Nigeria (Geographic: 8.99 degrees N, 7.39 degrees E; Geomagnetic latitude: -1.60). The study period covered 9 months with useable data of 139 nights between March 2016 and January 2018. The hourly zonal wind speed is between -124 and 163 ms(-1) and that of the meridional wind ranged between -70 and 95 ms(-1). Comparison of FPI ground-based measurements with estimates from the Horizontal Wind Model (HWM-14) accurately reproduced the post-midnight meridional component, but for some departure of similar to 50 ms(-1) during pre-midnight. A very good agreement is observed between the predicted and measured zonal winds speed in the month of January 2018. However, the HWM-14 more often underestimated the zonal wind speeds in the months of 2016. Hence, this necessitates a call for improvement of the HWM-14 by using newly observed data in order to better characterize the West African sector. The varying zonal winds showed modal periods of 25.9 and 133.5 days, which are quasi 27 days and quasiterannual periodic variations, respectively. On the meridional wind, oscillatory periods of 133.5 and 23.1 days are seen in year 2016 and 2017, respectively.

Resource type

document

Resource locator

Unique resource identifier

code

http://n2t.net/ark:/85065/d7vm4gnx

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

2021-03-01T00:00:00Z

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

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