Developing an analysis technique for identification of wave structures in MATS data

Abstract

This thesis presents a method for analyzing data gathered during the MATS mission. The MATS mission is a Swedish satellite mission which aims to improve our understanding of gravity waves in the mesosphere and their influence on the atmosphere. The MATS satellite will be launched in 2019, and observations will mainly be done by imaging the limb of the atmosphere. The development of a technique for analyzing such data resulted in a model which returns wave characteristics of waves identified within data sets similar to what is expected from the MATS mission. The model was tested with both synthetic data and more realistic data from a forward model made to simulate MATS data. The synthetic data was made to simulate gravity waves in the mesosphere, and was mainly used during the development of the model. The model developed treats and filters the data, and returns wave characteristics of waves present within the data set. The results presented in this thesis show that the model often mistakes noise and side lobes for waves, leading to an output not consistent with the expected results when synthetic data is used. However, the model was able to find the wave characteristics of data accepted as wave peaks, leading to the conclusion that the problems and inaccuracies in the output are from the identification of waves, and not from the calculations of the wave characteristics. Thus, further work with filtering and identifying waves in data fields resembling MATS data is needed.