Comparison of Mesospheric Densities and Temperatures from the SABER Instrument on NASA’s TIMED Satellite and USU’s ALO Rayleigh-Scatter Lidar

The Atmospheric Lidar Observatory (ALO) at USU has a Rayleigh Scatter Lidar (RSL) that operated from 1993 – 2004. It took data on the mesosphere, from 45 km to about 95 km, which was used to deduce absolute temperature and the relative neutral density. Recently, the analysis was modified to convert these relative neutral densities to absolute neutral densities. This used reanalysis models to provide absolute densities at 45 km to which the relative profiles could be normalized. With that, composite climatologies of densities and temperatures have been made using the lidar data. Similar climatologies can be made using data from the SABER instrument, on NASA’s TIMED satellite, which was launched in 2001 and has been operational from 2002 to the present. TIMED data from a 5x5 degree grid centered on Logan, UT, has been used to compare to nighttime temperatures and densities from the lidar. The similarities and differences are presented.