Concentric gravity waves over northern China observed by an airglow imager network and satellites

Abstract

Abstract The first no‐gap OH airglow all‐sky imager network was established in northern China in February 2012. The network is composed of six all‐sky airglow imagers that make observations of OH airglow gravity waves and cover an area of about 2000 km east and west and about 1400 km south and north. An unusual outbreak of Concentric Gravity Wave (CGW) events were observed by the network nearly every night during the first half of August 2013. These events were coincidentally observed by satellite sensors from Fengyun‐2 (FY‐2), Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS)/Aqua, and Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS)/Suomi National Polar‐orbiting Partnership (NPP). Combination of the ground imager network with satellites provides multilevel observations of the CGWs from the stratosphere to the mesopause region. In this paper, two representative CGW events in August 2013 are studied in detail: first is the CGW on the night of 13 August 2013, likely launched by a single thunderstorm. The temporal and spatial analyses indicate that the CGW horizontal wavelengths follow freely propagating waves based on a GW dispersion relation within 300 km from the storm center. In contrast, the more distant observed gravity wave field exhibits a smaller horizontal wavelength of ~20 km, and our analysis strongly suggest this wave field represents a ducted wave. A second event, exhibiting multiple CGWs, was induced by two very strong thunderstorms on 9 August 2013. Multiscale waves with horizontal wavelengths ranging from less than 10 km to 200 km were observed.