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Li et al. 2007
Li, T., She, C.-Y., Liu, H. and Montgomery, M.T. (2007). Evidence of a gravity wave breaking event and the estimation of the wave characteristics from sodium lidar observation over Fort Collins, CO (41°N, 105°W). Geophysical Research Letters 34: doi: 10.1029/2006GL028988. issn: 0094-8276.

On the night of December 3rd, 2004 (UT day 338), we observed a significant acceleration of horizontal wind near 100 km between 0900 and 0915 UT accompanied by a temperature cooling at the same altitude and warming below it. The Lomb spectrum analysis of the raw dataset revealed that a gravity wave with 1.5 hr period was significant between 0500 and 0900 UT, but blurred after 0900 UT, suggesting the transfer of wave energy and momentum from wave field to mean flow. Most likely, this observed phenomenon is due to the breaking of an upward propagating gravity wave with an apparent period of ~1.5 hr. Using linear saturation theory and assuming a monochromatic wave packet, we estimated the characteristics of breaking gravity wave, eddy diffusion coefficient, and a simple relation between Prandtl number and turbulence localization measure when the wave is breaking, from the experimentally determined heating rate, horizontal wind acceleration, and background temperature and winds.

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Keywords
Atmospheric Processes, Mesospheric dynamics, Atmospheric Processes, Middle atmosphere dynamics (0341, 0342), Atmospheric Processes, Remote sensing, Atmospheric Processes, Acoustic-gravity waves
Journal
Geophysical Research Letters
http://www.agu.org/journals/gl/
Publisher
American Geophysical Union
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