This paper presents an intercomparison of zonal winds observed by a sodium fluorescence lidar and three types of meteor radars – a multistatic meteor radar, a conventional monostatic radar, and a forward remote receiver – located near Hefei, China. The multistatic meteor radar shows the best agreement with the lidar measurements, confirming the reliability of its wind retrievals in the mesosphere and lower thermosphere and highlighting its potential for future atmospheric dynamics studies.

This paper reports the deployment of the first narrowband sodium lidar in the low-latitude region of China. The lidar observations are compared with satellite measurements and atmospheric models, confirming the scientific credibility of these results. Calculations of vertical gravity wave heat and sodium fluxes are used to investigate the influence of the space environment. This lidar system will provide a new ground-based detection device for studying atmospheric environment above the area.

The Indian Ocean strongly influences weather and climate far beyond its region. We found that unusual sea surface warming patterns in the midlatitude Indian Ocean can disrupt winds and temperatures in the middle atmosphere, including the stratosphere and mesosphere, of the Southern Hemisphere. These disturbances alter ozone and air movement and may affect polar climate. Our results highlight the need to include Indian Ocean variability in climate models for better predictions.

We present the impact of quasi-biennial oscillation (QBO) disruption events on diurnal tides over the low- and mid-latitude MLT region observed by a meteor radar chain. By using a global atmospheric model and reanalysis data, it is found that the stratospheric QBO winds can affect the mesospheric diurnal tides by modulating the subtropical ozone variability in the upper stratosphere and the interaction between tides and gravity waves in the mesosphere.

Metal layers occur in the mesosphere and lower thermosphere region 80–120 km from the ablation of cosmic dust. Nonmigrating diurnal tides are persistent global oscillations. We investigate nonmigrating diurnal tidal variations in metal layers using satellite observations and global climate model simulations; these have not been studied previously due to the limitations of measurements. The nonmigrating diurnal tides in temperature are strongly linked to the corresponding change in metal layers.

Modeling and prediction of ionospheric irregularities is an important topic in upper-atmospheric and upper-ionospheric physics. We proposed an artificial intelligence model to reconstruct the E-region ionospheric irregularities and first developed an open-source application for the community. The model reveals complex relationships between ionospheric irregularities and external driving factors. The findings suggest that spatiotemporal information plays an important role in the reconstruction.

In recent years, the concept of multistatic meteor radar systems has attracted the attention of the atmospheric radar community, focusing on the MLT region. In this study, we apply a multistatic meteor radar system consisting of a monostatic meteor radar in Mengcheng (33.36° N, 116.49° E) and a remote receiver in Changfeng (31.98° N, 117.22° E) to estimate the two-dimensional horizontal wind field, and the horizontal divergence and relative vorticity of the wind field.

We present a study on the climatology of the metal sodium layer in the upper atmosphere from the ground-based measurements obtained from a lidar network, the Odin satellite measurements, and a global model of meteoric sodium in the atmosphere. Comprehensively, comparisons show good agreement and some discrepancies between ground-based observations, satellite measurements, and global model simulations.

In this paper, the solar radiation index Y10 acts as an indicator of the solar activity, and the vertical column of ice water content (IWC) characterizes the nature of the polar mesosphere cloud (PMC). Superposed epoch analysis is used to determine the time lag days of temperature and IWC anomalies in responding to Y10 for the PMC seasons from 2007–2015. The results show that the IWC can respond quickly to temperature within time lag of one day.

The MLT DW1 amplitude is suppressed during El Niño winters in both satellite observation and SD-WACCM simulations. The suppressed Hough mode (1, 1) in the tropopause region propagates vertically to the MLT region, leading to decreased DW1 amplitude. The latitudinal zonal wind shear anomalies during El Niño winters would narrow the waveguide and prevent the vertical propagation of DW1. The gravity wave drag excited by ENSO-induced anomalous convection could also modulate the MLT DW1 amplitude.

During 11–20 March 2020, three aerosol transport events were investigated by a lidar system and an online bioaerosol detection system in Hefei, China. Observation results reveal that the events not only contributed to high particulate matter pollution but also to the transport of external bioaerosols, resulting in changes in the fraction of fluorescent biological aerosol particles. This detection method improved the time resolution and provided more parameters for aerosol detection.

The solitary wave theory is applied for the first time to study the sporadic sodium layers (Na_S). We perform soliton fitting processes on the observed data from the Andes Lidar Observatory, and find out that 24/27 Na_S events exhibit similar features to a soliton. Time series of the net anomaly reveal the same variation process to the solution of a five-order KdV equation. Our results suggest the Na_S phenomenon would be an appropriate tracer for nonlinear wave studies in the atmosphere.

Our study explores the variation in the occurrence date, peak amplitude and wave period for eastward waves and the role of instability, background wind structure and the critical layer in eastward wave propagation and amplification.