Modeling the August 2002 minor warming event

Hindcasts of the Southern Hemisphere minor stratospheric warming and mesospheric cooling event of August 2002, made with a new high altitude version of the Navy's operational forecast model, are compared with temperatures acquired by SABER (Sounding of the Atmosphere using Broadband Emission Radiometry). Results show realistic hemispheric evolution of both the stratospheric warming and mesospheric cooling over a 10‐day time period. Use of Rayleigh friction to model mesospheric gravity wave drag shows improvement in the upper mesosphere over a hindcast without Rayleigh friction. The limited vertical extent of the main mesospheric cooling signature disagrees with the Liu and Roble (2002) model results but is supported by SABER temperature observations (Siskind et al., 2005). Examination of 3D EP‐flux vectors over the 10‐day forecast suggests that the planetary wave responsible for the warming/cooling event originated from a horizontally localized region of the troposphere.