Extraction of motion parameters of gravity-wave structures from all-sky OH image sequences.

We describe the application of a motion model to OH images collected by CCD cameras during three nights in February and April 1995 (3 February, 1 April, and 4 April) at the StarFire Optical Range, New Mexico. We used the instrument to take broadband images of OH Meinel bands at an altitude of 87 km to record the footprints of dynamics created by acoustic gravity waves in the mesosphere. We used the motion model to extract the velocity of the gravity waves from the images. The results of a total of 181 observations with the motion model were compared with a total of 189 observations obtained by manual estimation. We used these results to extract the intrinsic properties of the gravity waves. The mean intrinsic velocity for the three nights under consideration was 61.5 +/- 17.0 m/s with the motion model and 61.1 +/- 23.3 m/s with manual estimation.

[1]  R. P. Lowe,et al.  WINDII/UARS observation of twilight behaviour of the hydroxyl airglow, at mid-latitude equinox , 1996 .

[2]  Michael T. Orchard,et al.  Overlapped block motion compensation: an estimation-theoretic approach , 1994, IEEE Trans. Image Process..

[3]  C. Gardner,et al.  Simultaneous nightglow and Na lidar observations at Arecibo during the AIDA-89 campaign , 1993 .

[4]  Gary R. Swenson,et al.  A model for calculating acoustic gravity wave energy and momentum flux in the mesosphere from OH airglow , 1998 .

[5]  A. W. Peterson,et al.  Airglow events visible to the naked eye. , 1979, Applied optics.

[6]  Chester S. Gardner,et al.  Observations of the unambiguous 2‐dimensional horizontal wave number spectrum of OH intensity perturbations , 1996 .

[7]  S. Franke,et al.  Interpretation of gravity waves observed in the mesopause region at Starfire Optical Range, New Mexico: Strong evidence for nonseparable intrinsic (m, ω) spectra , 1998 .

[8]  Mike Hapgood,et al.  Observations of gravity wave propagation in the OI (557.7 nm), Na (589.2 nm) and the near infrared OH nightglow emissions , 1987 .

[9]  Gary R. Swenson,et al.  Atmospheric airglow imaging with CCDs , 1994, Optics & Photonics.

[10]  Berthold K. P. Horn,et al.  Determining Optical Flow , 1981, Other Conferences.

[11]  Gary R. Swenson,et al.  OH emission and gravity waves (including a breaking wave) in all-sky imagery from Bear Lake, UT , 1994 .

[12]  C. Gardner.  Introduction to ALOHA/ANLC‐93: The 1993 airborne lidar and observations of the Hawaiian Airglow/Airborne Noctilucent Cloud Campaigns , 1995 .

[13]  C. Gardner.  Testing theories of atmospheric gravity wave saturation and dissipation , 1996 .

[14]  Azriel Rosenfeld,et al.  Image analysis: Problems, progress and prospects , 1984, Pattern Recognit..

[15]  Hans-Hellmut Nagel,et al.  On the Estimation of Optical Flow: Relations between Different Approaches and Some New Results , 1987, Artif. Intell..

[16]  Gary R. Swenson,et al.  Momentum and energy fluxes of monochromatic gravity waves observed by an OH imager at Starfire Optical Range, New Mexico , 1999 .

[17]  Chester S. Gardner,et al.  Analytical models for the responses of the mesospheric OH* and Na layers to atmospheric gravity waves , 1998 .

[18]  F. Dalaudier,et al.  An improved atmospheric buoyancy wave spectrum model , 1988 .

[19]  S. Mende,et al.  Instrument for the monochromatic observation of all sky auroral images. , 1977, Applied optics.

[20]  C. McLandress,et al.  On the importance of gravity waves in the middle atmosphere and their parameterization in general circulation models , 1998 .

[21]  J García,et al.  Nonlinear morphological correlation: optoelectronic implementation. , 1998, Applied optics.