An updated climatology of thermospheric neutral winds andFregion ion drifts above Millstone Hill

Incoherent scatter radar data from 63 experiments during the period 1984–1997 have been used to update earlier published climatologies of ion drifts and neutral thermospheric winds at Millstone Hill. Data are binned according to season, solar activity, geomagnetic activity, and local solar time. The derived ion drift patterns are similar to those previously published, but we now find that the main effect of the increased magnetic activity is an enhancement of the usual nighttime west-ward ion drift. A tidal decomposition of the winds from geomagnetically quiet conditions is carried out for each season/solar activity level to extract diurnal means, diurnal amplitudes and phases, and semidiurnal components. These winds are compared with previous results at Millstone Hill and the HWM-93 model. Using our expanded wind database, statistically significant semidiurnal components are now found in both summer and winter, at both solar maximum and solar minimum. Our bin-averaged results confirm earlier published findings that at all seasons the diurnal mean winds are more strongly equatorward and the diurnal amplitudes are stronger at solar cycle minimum than at solar cycle maximum. Diurnal amplitudes derived in the present work are larger than those found previously because we now use a smaller value for the O+, O collision frequency. Differences in the diurnal mean and diurnal amplitude between recent solar minimum data (1993–1997) and data from the previous solar minimum (1984–1986) are attributed to a difference in the EUV flux as inferred from Millstone Hill electron density data which one would not expect from the F10.7 index. This affects the ion drag and apparently also the relative importance of the EUV and high latitude heat sources.