An innovative technique to probe the middle and upper atmosphere Free

The middle atmosphere has gained more and more importance for the purpose of weather and climate prediction, since increasing evidence indicates that the troposphere and stratosphere are more closely coupled than assumed before. Significant effort has been made toward a more comprehensive representation of the atmosphere to better capture the stratospheric variability as well as the stratospheric-tropospheric interactions, for example, during Sudden Stratospheric Warming (SSW) events. Despite these advances, the upper layers of the atmosphere have remained a region that is difficult to monitor. Over recent years, new developments in the field of infrasound have lead to an innovative method for evaluating numerical weather prediction models. In this presentation, the general technique will be described and a case study will be presented in which stratospheric forecasts of the 2013 major SSW are evaluated.