EGUsphere EGUsphere EGUsphere EGUsphere Copernicus Publications Göttingen, Germany 10.5194/egusphere-2026-3156 Inferring heating and cooling rates at the MLT from multistatic meteor radar observations and intercomparison to SE-WACCM-X and JAWARA Stober Gunter https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7909-6345 1 2 Liu Hanli 3 Qiao Zishun https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6900-7313 3 Sato Kaoru https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6225-6066 4 Pearl Poku Loretta https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8121-6692 1 2 Krochin Witali https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3538-8143 1 2 Liu Alan 5 Kozlovsky Alexander https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1468-7600 6 Janches Diego 7 Zeng Jie https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3146-3281 8 9 10 Yi Wen https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3717-6811 8 9 10 Tsutsumi Masaki https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0113-8311 11 12 Gulbrandsen Njål 13 Nozawa Satonori https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4359-6524 14 Lester Mark 15 Kero Johan https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2177-6751 16 Mitchell Nicholas 17 18 Institute of Applied Physics, University of Bern, Switzerland Oeschger Center for Climate Change Research, University of Bern, Switzerland High Altitude Observatory, NSF National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, Colorado, USA Department of Earth and Planetary Science, University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan Center for Space and Atmospheric Research, Department of Physical Sciences, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, Daytona Beach, Florida, USA Sodankylä Geophysical Observatory, University of Oulu, Oulu, Finland ITM Physics Laboratory, Mail Code 675, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD 20771, USA National Key Laboratory of Deep Space Exploration, School of Earth and Space Sciences, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei 230026, China CAS Center for Excellence in Comparative Planetology, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China Anhui Mengcheng National Geophysical Observatory and Research Station, School of Earth and Space Sciences, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China National Institute of Polar Research, Tachikawa, Japan The Graduate University for Advanced Studies (SOKENDAI), Tokyo, Japan Tromsø Geophysical Observatory UiT – The Arctic University of Norway, Tromsø, Norway Institute for Space-Earth Environmental Research, Nagoya University, Japan Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Leicester, Leicester, UK Swedish Institute of Space Physics (IRF), Kiruna, Sweden British Antarctic Survey, Cambridge, UK Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Leicester, Leicester, UK 11 06 2026 2026 1 21 Copyright: © 2026 Gunter Stober et al. 2026 This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this licence, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This article is available from https://egusphere.copernicus.org/preprints/2026/egusphere-2026-3156/ The full text article is available as a PDF file from https://egusphere.copernicus.org/preprints/2026/egusphere-2026-3156/egusphere-2026-3156.pdf

Continuous measurements of vertical wind in the mesosphere and lower thermosphere are rare and technically challenging. However, multistatic meteor radar networks, such as the Nordic Meteor Radar Cluster, offer a unique opportunity to use advanced tomographic wind retrieval methods to determine neutral winds, including vertical wind components. The Spherical Volume Velocity Processing technique is a newly developed tomographic algorithm that enables the extraction of Doppler-based vertical winds and the computation of vertical winds from horizontal divergence through vertical integration.<br />In this study, we present an intercomparison of various vertical wind retrieval methods to evaluate remaining biases and to quantify the magnitude of summer mesospheric vertical upwelling and corresponding downwelling. The retrieved wind data are compared with the Japanese meteorological reanalysis known as JAWARA, as well as a year of free-running SE-WACCM-X model data. Our findings indicate a strong agreement concerning the seasonal patterns of horizontal winds between the Nordic Meteor Radar Cluster and both models. The observed vertical wind velocities range from 2 to 15 cm/s. Additionally, measurements from the Nordic Meteor Radar Cluster show cooling and heating rates of -40 to 100 K/day during summer and 5 to 20 K/day in the winter months.

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