This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5). The project is to deploy a field-proven Fe Boltzmann temperature lidar to the U.S. Antarctic station McMurdo, and to conduct there multi-year observations pursuing the following scientific objectives: (a) To establish a temperature record throughout the polar atmosphere at 78°S to monitor climate change, (b) To validate sophisticated atmospheric models that are used to project the future state of our climate system, and (c) To characterize the thermal structure, polar mesospheric clouds, heterogeneous chemistry, large-scale dynamics, and gravity waves in the polar middle atmosphere. The project's long-term goal is to operate the lidar at McMurdo through complete 11-yrs solar activity cycle characterizing middle atmosphere responses to the solar activity and its annual and inter-annual variations, and extracting long-term secular trends to assess potential climate changes in the middle atmosphere. These observations will provide crucial information on the polar middle atmosphere in the critical latitudinal gap region mid-way between the South Pole and Antarctic Circle, completing observations in combination with previous measurements made at the South Pole and Rothera stations. Analysis of the atmospheric gravity wave fields at McMurdo will be particularly useful in advancing understanding of wave coupling and providing better constraints to wave parameterizations by utilizing simultaneous lidar, MF radar, and satellite measurements.
