Monthly tidal temperatures 20-120 km from TIMED/SABER

The SABER instrument on the TIMED satellite provides unprecedented geographical coverage for the determination and study of atmospheric tides. However, the slow local time precession rate of TIMED can cause longer-term temperature variations to alias into the tidal signals. A new method of analyzing satellite data for tides has been developed to circumvent this difficulty, but at the expense of temporal resolution of the tidal fields, i.e., 120-day mean tidal structures are obtained. In this work, we apply this method to SABER temperature data to derive a series of 120-day mean tidal structures, extending between 20 and 120 km altitude, 50°S-50°N latitude, and centered on each month from September 2003 to September 2004. In addition to the migrating (Sun-synchronous) diurnal and semidiurnal tides, a number of nonmigrating tides are revealed in the SABER measurements. Some of these waves are thought to originate via nonlinear coupling between the migrating tides and the stationary planetary wave with zonal wave number s= 1. Other nonmigrating tidal components appear to be forced by latent heating due to deep tropical convection. Of the latter, the eastward propagating diurnal tide with s = 3 is dominant and is as large as the migrating diurnal tide during some months. Of particular interest is the wave-4 structure with respect to longitude that characterizes both the diurnal and semidiurnal total tidal fields. This feature is a result of the predominant wave-4 topography/land-sea longitude dependence at the surface, which is reflected in the diurnal and semidiurnal components of the latent heating rates due to deep tropical convection. The ability of the global-scale wave model (GSWM) to approximate the observed tidal fields, including the wave-4 total tidal structures, is also assessed. Copyright 2006 by the American Geophysical Union.