WAVELET ANALYSIS OF TURBULENCE IN THE MESOSPHERE

During the past several decades considerable progress has been made concerning the efforts to characterize the presence and force of turbulence in the mesosphere. While ground based studies using radars were successful providing a preliminary qualitative overview of turbulent activity in the upper middle atmosphere, the deployment of in situ sounding rocket experiments has provided us with significantly more quantitative measurements of turbulent eddy motions. In an effort to study the global atmosphere and weather we consider the analysis of mesospheric turbulence measured by rocket borne ionization instruments. The standard Short-Time Fourier approach has already been used to process the existing data that would give us information about the frequency features vs. altitude of turbulent regions in the mesosphere. However, wavelet analysis is introduced as an alternative suitable tool to derive spectral information of the data. Due to wavelet analysis ability to isolate short-duration processes embedded in highly-structured harmonic phenomena, it is believed that it might provide us with additional information on the actual vertical extent of the observed turbulent structures.