Retrieval of Nighttime Distributions of Mesosphere–Lower Thermosphere Characteristics from Satellite Data

Abstract

The database of the SABER/TIMED satellite campaign includes the reconstruction results of nighttime distributions of O, H, and some other characteristics at heights of the mesosphere–lower thermosphere from measurements of volume emission rate ofOH* profiles near 2 μm, temperature, and ozone. The retrieval procedure is based on the chemical equilibrium approximation of nighttime ozone and a model of two excited OH states (ν = 9.8) forming the indicated radiation. In this work, a modernized model of these levels with the corrected constants corresponding to published data is used to retrieve O, H, OH, HO₂, and the chemical heating rate at altitudes of 80–100 km according to SABER/TIMED measurements in 2002–2021. It is found that the new parameters of the retrieval procedure lead to significant (up to 2 times or more) changes in the spatial distributions of O, H, and chemical heating rate, but only a slight change in OH and HO₂ distributions.