Project Description 

Gravity waves generated in the troposphere by thunderstorms can propagate vertically to much higher altitudes, as high as the mesosphere and lower thermosphere. At these heights, they can interact with chemically active regions of the atmosphere to produce optical emissions commonly known as airglow. Gravity wave motions and their interaction with airglow chemistry can be simulated using a numerical model developed here at Penn State University. My summer research project is to take photon volume emissions rates from the simulated data to calculate how much light would be collected by an airglow imaging system located on the ground. I will be using MATLAB to integrate data describing the emissions for all heights of the atmosphere. Emissions resulting from different reactions that occur at specific altitude ranges, each reaction having a characteristic wavelength, must be considered separately. The intensity of the light that is actually recorded at the ground depends on the integration time of the camera and the integration over altitude of the airglow emissions, in addition to losses due to atmospheric composition and to the optics and filters of the imaging system. I am thus exploring different methods of numerical interpolation and integration to analyze simulated gravity wave-induced airglow perturbations, which will be calibrated to allow direct comparison with observed airglow data.