Estimation of three-dimensional atmospheric wave parameters from ground-based spectroscopic airglow image data

This paper describes the methodology to estimate the intrinsic parameters of atmospheric gravity waves from multiple ground-based observations of a single mesospheric airglow emission. In this configuration, several spectroscopic imagers are placed on the ground to achieve multiple perspectives of the emission as it is perturbed by gravity waves. The classical way to analyze this data is to use a tomographic approach to estimate the wave parameters. In this paper, a strategy is developed to estimate the wave parameters directly from the data without using tomography. This approach is then demonstrated with a simulation.