An inversion technique to recover lower thermospheric winds from space-borne remote measurements of (OI) 5577 angstroms

new wind inversion technique that I developed to obtain neutral wind profiles from space-borne Fabry-Perot Interferometer (FPI) measurements of atmospheric airglow is presented. This generalized numerical technique is applied to (OI) 5577 A measurements taken with the FPI on board NASA's Dynamics Explorer-2 (DE-2) satellite to obtain wind profiles in the lower thermosphere (altitude range: 90 km to 150 km). DE2-FPI was the first satellite-borne instrument with sufficient spectral resolution to recover wind (and temperature) information from atmospheric emissions. An inversion technique must be applied to retrieve true wind profiles from space-borne (OI) 5577 A measurements because the non-local nature of this emission causes information to be averaged over altitude. As a precursory step to the wind inversion, I developed two brightness inversion techniques to recover the (OI) 5577 A volume emission rate profiles. Both the wind and the brightness inversion techniques were assessed for statistical and systematic errors using a DE2-FPI numerical simulator, also developed here. With this inversion method, it was possible to retrieve lower thermospheric winds with an accuracy of up to...