Global-scale gravity wave analysis methodology for the ESA Earth Explorer 11 candidate CAIRT

Abstract. In the past, satellite climatologies of gravity waves (GWs) have initiated progress in their representation in global models. However, these could not provide the phase speed and direction distributions needed for a better understanding of the interaction between GWs and the large-scale winds directly. The ESA Earth Explorer 11 candidate CAIRT could provide such observations. CAIRT would use a limb-imaging Michelson interferometer resolving a wide spectral range, allowing temperature and trace gas mixing ratio measurements. With the proposed instrument design, a vertical resolution of 1 km, along-track sampling of 50 km, and across-track sampling of 25 km in a 400 km wide swath will be achieved. In particular, this allows for the observation of three-dimensional (3D), GW-resolving temperature fields throughout the middle atmosphere. In this work, we present the methodology for the GW analysis of CAIRT observations using a limited-volume 3D sinusoidal fit (S3D) wave analysis technique. We assess the capability of CAIRT to provide high-quality GW fields by the generation of synthetic satellite observations from high-resolution model data and comparison of the synthetic observations to the original model fields. For the assessment, wavelength spectra, phase speed spectra, horizontal distributions, and zonal means of GW momentum flux (GWMF) are considered. The atmospheric events we use to exemplify the capabilities of CAIRT are the 2006 sudden stratospheric warming (SSW) event, the quasi-biennial oscillation (QBO) in the tropics, and the mesospheric preconditioning phase of the 2019 SSW event. Our findings indicate that CAIRT would provide highly reliable observations not only of global-scale GW distributions and drag patterns but also of specific wave events and their associated wave parameters. Even under worse-than-expected noise levels of the instrument, the resulting GW measurements are highly consistent with the original model data. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the estimated GW parameters can be used for ray tracing, which physically extends the horizontal coverage of the observations beyond the orbit tracks.