Articles | Volume 8, issue 11
https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-8-4645-2015
https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-8-4645-2015
Research article
 | 
05 Nov 2015
Research article |  | 05 Nov 2015

Evaluation of methods for gravity wave extraction from middle-atmospheric lidar temperature measurements

B. Ehard, B. Kaifler, N. Kaifler, and M. Rapp

Abstract. This study evaluates commonly used methods of extracting gravity-wave-induced temperature perturbations from lidar measurements. The spectral response of these methods is characterized with the help of a synthetic data set with known temperature perturbations added to a realistic background temperature profile. The simulations are carried out with the background temperature being either constant or varying in time to evaluate the sensitivity to temperature perturbations not caused by gravity waves. The different methods are applied to lidar measurements over New Zealand, and the performance of the algorithms is evaluated. We find that the Butterworth filter performs best if gravity waves over a wide range of periods are to be extracted from lidar temperature measurements. The running mean method gives good results if only gravity waves with short periods are to be analyzed.

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Short summary
We evalute four methods currently used for gravity wave extraction from lidar temperature measurements. The spectral response of these methods is determined with the help of synthetic temperature perturbations. Afterwards, the methods are applied to lidar temperature measurements over New Zealand for further evaluation of the four algorithms. Based on the results two methods are recommended for gravity wave extraction.