Temperature extraction from spacecraft density profiles in the presence of wave activity

In the absence of direct atmospheric temperature measurements, density data along spacecraft trajectories are often used to extract temperature profiles, a process that can fail in the presence of wave activity (Leclercq et al., 2020). Because spacecraft data are often not sufficient to uniquely characterize wave-like perturbations, we examine the difference between predicted and extracted temperature profiles based on linearized solutions to the wave equations and briefly discuss the relevance to wave activity in the upper atmospheres of Mars and Titan. We find that the extracted temperatures are significantly overestimated for the full range of acoustic gravity wave parameters but are somewhat underestimated for a range of internal gravity wave parameters, and the density amplitudes can serve as a proxy for the extracted temperature amplitudes when estimating the heating rates. •The local temperatures in the upper atmospheres of planets extracted from density data using the hydrostatic approximation can be incorrect in the presence of wave activity•Using a 2D linear model we examine when that method fails in the presence of significant wave activity in the upper atmospheres of Mars and Titan