The Lunar Tide: An Enduring Atmospheric Problem

I took my first course in atmospheric dynamics with Marv in Spring, 1970, at the University of Illinois. It is here, and through exposure to his PhD thesis on the lunar tide, that I was first inspired to study waves and tides in the atmosphere, a passion that continues to this very day. Marvin and I in fact wrote a paper on lunar tidal variations of an atmospheric emission that was published in 1972. This problem was revisited in a 2015 publication using a decade's worth of airglow observations from the SCIAMACHY instrument on the Envisat satellite. This leap from the past is in fact emblematic of the study of the lunar atmospheric tide across several atmospheric disciplines, made possible mostly by the availability of various types of satellite-based observations over the past decade, numerical modeling advances, and the fact that the lunar tide is strongly amplified during stratospheric warming events. In my talk, I will trace the important milestones regarding study of the lunar tide over the 45 years since Marv's inspiring Dissertation research, culminating in the current recognition of the lunar tide as an important contributor to the “space weather” of the ionosphere-thermosphere system.