We measured polar mesospheric clouds (PMCs), our Earth’s highest clouds at the edge of space, with a Rayleigh lidar from a stratospheric balloon. We describe how we derive the cloud’s brightness and discuss the stability of the gondola pointing and the sensitivity of our measurements. We present our high-resolution PMC dataset that is used to study dynamical processes in the upper mesosphere, e.g. regarding gravity waves, mesospheric bores, vortex rings, and Kelvin–Helmholtz instabilities.

We present observations of winds in the mesosphere and lower thermosphere (MLT) from a recently installed meteor radar on the remote island of South Georgia (54° S, 36° W). We characterise mean winds, tides, planetary waves, and gravity waves in the MLT at this location and compare our measured winds with a leading climate model. We find that the observed wintertime winds are unexpectedly reversed from model predictions, probably because of missing impacts of secondary gravity waves in the model.

Small-scale turbulent structures are ubiquitous in the atmosphere, yet our understanding of their structure and dynamics is vastly incomplete. IDEAL aimed to improve our understanding of small-scale turbulent flow features in the lower atmosphere. A small, unmanned, fixed-wing aircraft was employed to make targeted observations of atmospheric columns. Measured data were used to guide atmospheric model simulations designed to describe the structure and dynamics of small-scale turbulence.

Based on the gradient balance wind theory and the SABER observations, a dataset of monthly mean zonal wind has been developed at heights of 18–100 km and latitudes of 50° Sndash;50° N from 2002 to 2019. The dataset agrees with the zonal wind from models (MERRA2, UARP, HWM14) and observations by meteor radar and lidar at seven stations. The dataset can be used to study seasonal and interannual variations and can serve as a background for wave studies of tides and planetary waves.

Long- and short-period oscillations in the lunar semidiurnal tidal amplitudes in the ionosphere derived from the total electron content were investigated over Brazil from 2011 to 2014. The results showed  annual, semiannual and triannual oscillations as the dominant components. Additionally, the most pronounced short-period oscillations were observed between 7 and 11 d, which suggest a possible coupling of the lunar tide and planetary waves.

In this study, we report the climatology of migrating and non-migrating tides in mesopause winds estimated using multiyear observations from three meteor radars in the southern equatorial region. The results reveal that the climatological patterns of tidal amplitudes by meteor radars is similar to the Climatological Tidal Model of the Thermosphere (CTMT) results and the differences are mainly due to the effect of the stratospheric sudden warming (SSW) event.

Solar atmospheric tides are natural oscillations of 24, 12, 8... hours that contribute to the circulation of the atmosphere from low to high altitudes. The Sun heats the atmosphere periodically because, mainly, water vapor and ozone absorb solar radiation between the ground and 50 km height during the day. Tides propagate upward and they can be observed in, for example, the wind field. This work presents diurnal tides observed by meteor radars which measure wind between 80 and 100 km height.

Global coverage measurements made by satellites have provided observational studies which have shown the presence of four peaks in global longitudinal structures from global local time observations of equatorial ionization anomalies. The structures seen in the ionosphere are related to the diurnal non-migrating wave that comes from the troposphere and can be noticed in periods of low and high solar activity in the low-latitude ionosphere regions, mainly at altitudes from ~ 250 km up to ~ 800 km.

This work presents four events of mesosphere fronts observed on King George Island, Antarctic Peninsula, in the year 2011. The atmospheric background environment was analyzed to investigate the propagation conditions for all cases. To investigate the sources for such cases, satellite images were used. In two cases, we found that strong tropospheric instabilities were potential sources, and in the other two cases, it was not possible to associate them with tropospheric sources.

A comparative study of the quasi-16-day wave in the middle from three Brazilian stations, indicates multiple modes of the concerned wave component. The wave amplitude shows maxima in summer and winter. A potential coupling of the concerned wave with other short period planetary waves is found. The dominant wave components vary from the westward to eastward from the tropical to mid-latitude in the stratosphere. The prevailing westerly wind may favor the wave filtering of westward waves.

The quasi-5-day wave at mid- and high-latitudes in the mesosphere and lower-thermosphere was compared between the hemispheres using meteor radar horizontal wind measurements, spanning June 2010 to December 2012. Variances of the quasi-5-day wave showed a wave activity from July to August in both hemispheres and in April 2012 in the Northern Hemisphere and November 2012 in the Southern Hemisphere with unique characteristics at each site.

Multi-year observations of gravity wave momentum fluxes have been analyzed at three different sites using meteor radar data. This is a first, as no such experimental results on the latitudinal dependence of these parameters at low latitudes had been derived with ground-based instruments in the MLT region before. Until now similar studies had been carried out with satellites and circulation models. Therefore this thematic can be lead to a valuable scientific contribution.