Atmospheric Tides at Low Latitudes in the Martian Upper Atmosphere Observed by MAVEN IUVS

Abstract

AbstractThe present work studies the variation of the wave 3 structure in the Martian upper atmosphere at low latitudes. CO2 densities produced by the Imaging Ultraviolet Spectrograph (IUVS) onboard the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN spacecraft from October 2014 to September 2021 are utilized to study the variation of the wave 3 structure under different seasons. By normalizing the densities to a fixed Extreme Ultraviolet level and applying harmonic fitting techniques, the wave 3 structures are derived from the IUVS observations. We find that the wave 3 structure tends to propagate eastward with increasing local time and altitude at low latitudes, which is consistent with the variability of the wave 3 structure at high latitudes. The altitudinal variation of the wave 3 structure also indicates that the dissipation effects become essential in the Martian upper atmosphere. By comparing the shifting speed of the wave structure with the phase speed of prominent tides in different seasons, we find that DE2 and SE1 jointly generate the wave 3 structure at low latitudes. This is confirmed by the seasonal variations of DE2 and SE1 proposed by Mars Climate Database (MCD) latitude‐Ls predictions. Comparisons of the MCD predictions with the height‐latitude amplitude distributions of the wave 3 structure reveal the existence of both DE2 and SE1 tides. By decomposing the wave 3 structure into latitudinal symmetric and antisymmetric components and comparing it with the first few Hough modes of DE2 and SE1, we confirm that DE2 and SE1 are the possible candidates that generate the wave 3 structure.