Gravity waves in the mesosphere lower-thermosphere region near Andes observed by airglow imaging at Rio Gallegos (51.6S), Patagonia, Argentina

• Main Authors: Nakamura, T., Ejiri, M., Kogure, M., Perwitasari, S., Tomikawa, Y., Tsutsumi, M., Mizuno, A., Tsuno, K., Ogawa, T., Wada, S., Salvador, J.
• Format: Conference Object
• Language: English
• Published: 2023
• Subjects: Antarctic; Antarctic Peninsula; Argentina; Gallegos; Patagonia; South Pole; Syowa Station; The Antarctic; Antarc*; South pole
• Online Access: https://gfzpublic.gfz-potsdam.de/pubman/item/item_5021234

Atmospheric gravity waves play important roles in couplings in the terrestrial atmosphere and ionosphere, i.e. in the whole atmosphere, by transporting momentum and energy in vertical and horizontal directions. One of the hotspots, i.e. active source region of such gravity waves, is the area of the Andes and the Antarctic peninsula. In order to study gravity wave activity generated at this hotspot and propagating up to the MLT region, we installed an all-sky airglow camera in November 2017 at Rio Gallegos station (51.6S, 69.3W), Patagonia, Argentina. The imager at Rio Gallegos is equipped with an InGaAs array sensor, sensitive to the near-infrared (900-1700 nm), and can observe OH Meinel band airglow (~87 km altitude), obtaining an OH airglow image every 5 sec with an exposure time of 2 sec. This system has a similar specification with the five imagers of the ANtarctic Gravity Wave Instrument Network (ANGWIN) at Davis, McMurdo, Halley, Syowa and the south pole. In this presentation, we will report the results from Rio Gallegos station, by means of M-transform analysis, which quantitatively derives distributions of short-period gravity wave energy in the horizontal phase velocity domain. Also, comparison with the results from Syowa station in the Antarctic (69.0S, 39.6E) will be presented.