The Observation and SD-WACCM Simulation of Planetary Wave Activity in the Middle Atmosphere During the 2019 Southern Hemispheric Sudden Stratospheric Warming

Abstract

A sudden stratospheric warming (SSW) is an extremely rare event in the Southern Hemisphere (SH), but occurred in early September 2019. From the Antarctic meteor radar (MR) stations, Davis (68.6S, 77.9E) and King Sejong Station (62.2S, 58.8W), quasi 10-day oscillations were clearly observed in the zonal mesospheric winds before the central date (DOY 253) of the SSW. From the northern low-latitude Tirupati (13.6N, 79.4E) MR, a strong wave activity with a period of similar to 6 days was detected in the zonal winds right after the central date. This oscillation is also seen in the geopotential height measurements from the Microwave Limb Sounder (MLS) on board the Aura satellite near the Tirupati region. To elucidate the possible source of the quasi 6-day wave (Q6DW), we use a specified dynamics version of the Whole Atmosphere Community Climate Model (SD-WACCM) constrained by the reanalysis data from the surface to 50 km. The simulation results show that the amplitude of the westward and equatorward propagating Q6DW was enhanced after the SSW central date in the MLT region, and the Q6DW can be attributed to the baroclinic/barotropic instability in the SH high-latitude mesosphere where the divergence of Eliassen-Palm flux occurred. Thus, we suggest that the Q6DW activity observed by the Tirupati MR and MLS originated from the SH high-latitude mesospheric region. Both the observation and the simulation results clearly demonstrate that the 2019 SH SSW affected not only the high-latitude MLT region but also the low-latitude MLT region.