Daily static stability in the middle and upper atmosphere derived from SABER observations

The SABER (Sounding of the Atmosphere using Broadband Emission Radiometry) instrument onboard the TIMED (Thermosphere-Ionosphere-Mesosphere Energetics and Dynamics) satellite has been launched in the end to 2001 and released data since January, 2002. Until now, The SABER instrument has worked 22 years (2002–2023) and measures the atmospheric temperature and other species profiles in the height range of 15–110 km. The latitude coverage is at 83°S–53°N or 53°S–83°N due to the changing yaw maneuver of the SABER viewing mode every ~60 days. The atmospheric structure and perturbations in the middle and upper atmosphere can be derived from the temperature profiles. Here we present the global daily static stability from 2002 to 2023. The dataset includes: daily zonal mean temperature and static stability, as well as their corresponding latitude, date, local time and the notations of ascending and descending nodes. The dataset of each year is archived in a NetCDF (short for nc) file. The description of each variable is listed in Table 1. The static stability is an important parameter in assessing the environment where the waves propagate, and thus play a role of “bridge” between background atmosphere and waves’ propagation. The dataset of static stability is the basis for atmospheric dynamics. The possible applications of the dataset include (not solely): (1) the global distributions of static stability and their long-term variations; (2) the responses of global static stability to solar and geomagnetic activities, the quasi-biennial oscillations in the stratosphere, El Nino and La Nina, etc.; (3) with the help of the dataset of atmospheric gravity waves, one can study the relations between the static stability and gravity waves; (4) exploring the space weather and the mechanisms behind the coupling of different atmosphere layers.