Evidence of gravity wave breaking in lidar data from the mesopause region

An outstanding question about the dynamics of the mesosphere is the temporal and spatial distribution of nonlinear events such as wave‐breaking, wave saturation, and wave‐critical layer interactions. A climatology of these events will help us understand how the mesoscale dynamical features, such as gravity waves, interact with the background mean wind and temperature structure. New lidar systems have the resolution to show us a height versus time “picture” of the dynamics so that identifying individual events within the observation window of the instrument is now possible. At the Starfire Optical Range (SOR) a sodium resonance lidar provides simulataneous sodium density, temperature, and three components of the winds. In this paper we present “pictures” of individual wave events apparent in the lidar data using the temperature (plotted as potential temperature and spectra) to show the time evolution of the wave structure.