Mentor

Mike J. Taylor

Document Type

Report

Publication Date

4-22-2015

First Page

1

Last Page

8

Abstract

The Utah State Mesospheric Temperature Mapper (MTM) is a high resolution CCD imager capable of remote sensing faint optical emissions from the night sky to determine mesospheric temperature and its variability at an altitude of ~87 km (or 50 miles). The MTM was operated at the Bear Lake Observatory (BLO) for a two year period (Jan 2012 – Dec 2013) to investigate the seasonal characteristics of temperature variability at mid-latitudes.

This study was to be done from March 2013 – April 2014 but due to issues with the data in late 2013 it was changed to January 2013 - December 2013. But when looking at the variance plot for 2013 it was noticed that because of the issues in the second half of 2013 a good understanding of the variance could not be obtained. Thus the project was changed again to look at January 2013 – December 2013. Then the reduced variance would be compared to a similar camera operation USU has in Chile to determine if we see similar strong winter-summer variance. The original goal of this study was to calculate the nightly temperature variance from OH and O2. Unfortunately the nothing conclusive came from the O2 temperatures.

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