Global Balanced Wind Derived from SABER Temperature and Pressure Observations and its Validations.

Zonal winds in the stratosphere and mesosphere play important roles in the atmospheric dynamics and aeronomy. However, the direct measurement of winds in this height range is difficult. We present a dataset of the monthly mean zonal wind in the height range of 18-100 km and at latitudes of 50°S-50°N from 2002 to 2019, which is derived by the gradient balance wind theory and the temperature and pressure observed by the SABER instrument. The tide alias above 80 km at the equator is replaced by the monthly mean zonal wind measured by a meteor radar at 0.2°S. The dataset (named as BU) is validated by comparing with the zonal wind from MERRA2 (MerU), UARP (UraU), HWM14 empirical model (HwmU), meteor radar (MetU) and lidar (LidU) at seven stations from 53.5°N to 29.7°S. At 18-70 km, BU and MerU have (1) nearly identical zero wind lines, (2) year-to-year variations of the eastward/westward wind jets at middle and high latitudes, (3) the quasi-biennial oscillation (QBO) and semi-annual oscillation (SAO), especially the anormal QBO in early 2016. The comparisons among BU, UraU and HwmU show good agreement in general below 80 km. Above 80 km, the agreements among BU, UraU, HwmU, MetU and LidU are good in general, except some discrepancies at limited heights and months. The BU data are archived as netCDF files and can be available at https://dx.doi.org/10.12176/01.99.00574 (Liu et al., 2021). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]