Abstract Lower atmospheric tides are important for driving the thermospheric and ionospheric structure. The effects of different lower atmospheric migrating semidiurnal tidal fields of neutral density, temperature, and winds on the thermospheric winds are investigated by using the global ionosphere‐thermosphere model with forcing of the tides at the lower boundary. When driven by full tidal fields, the thermospheric winds show global perturbations up to 500 km altitude, with the maximum response at low latitudes and below 150 km altitude. Unexpectedly, the combined density and temperature tides together drive wind perturbations at nearly the same level as the full tidal fields, while the wind tides alone from the lower atmosphere cause weak perturbations indicating a relatively in situ‐driven thermospheric wind system. In addition, nonlinearities exist in separating the density and the temperature fields. The wind tides slightly reduce nonlinearities by counteracting the wind perturbations driven by density and temperature tides.
Wu et al. (Sun,) studied this question.