Global structures of the DE3 tide

The Hough mode decomposition (HMD) is used to investigate the global structures of the eastward propagating diurnal tide of zonal wavenumber 3 (DE3). The tide is delineated by using the SABER/ TIMED temperatures collected during 2002―2006. The HMD analysis results show that the DE3 tide is primarily dominated by two leading propagating Hough modes, i.e., (-3, 3) and (-3, 4) modes; the in-fluences .of the other Hough modes including trapped modes can be neglected. Based upon the HMD analysis results, this paper first reported the maximum of the tidal activity in the MLT region. The re-sults show that the DE3 tide exhibits annual unimodal distribution with the maximal amplitude occur-ring at 110 km in late summer (around July each year). Moreover, characteristic 2-year period variation is observed in the (-3, 3) Hough mode. And this type of inter-annual variation is further reflected in the tidal amplitude at 110 km height. For example, corresponding to the 2-year variation of the (-3, 3) mode, the DE3 tidal amplitude exhibits two substantially enhanced activities with maximal amplitude exceed-ing 12 K in 2002 and 2004, respectively. Moreover, current investigation results indicate that the influ-ence of the second propagating Hough mode, (-3, 4) mode, is important, in particular at the height un-der 100 km, where the DE3 amplitudes exhibit antisymmetric distribution with respect to the equator. The (-3, 4) mode exhibits bimodal distribution over a yearly course, which dominates the DE3 tide in the lower mesosphere. For example, two maximal DE3 activities were observed in late-winter-to-early- spring and late-autumn-to-early-winter, respectively. The first maximum is seen in the south of the equator, and the second maximum is in the north of it.