Project Description

During the past twenty years considerable progress has been made regarding the efforts to characterize the occurrence and strength of turbulence in the mesosphere. While ground based studies using radars were successful providing an initial qualitative overview of turbulent activity in the upper middle atmosphere, the utilization of rocket borne in situ experiments provided a significant advance allowing for a precise, quantitative measurement 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 activities 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.