In this work, Kedeng Zhang, Wenbin Wang and others, investigate the longitudinal patterns of thermospheric zonal winds (~400 km) and their seasonal and solar activity dependence.

For the first time, a new module enables Jing Liu and others to investigate the intimate coupling between polar turbulence electron heating and thermosphere disturbances in the context of a first principle, self-consistent model.

Plain Language Summary or Abstract: Whole atmosphere models offer the opportunity to improve specification and forecasting of the upper atmosphere through incorporating the effects of forcing from both the lower atmosphere as well as the Sun.

Numerical studies have shown that there is a lower thermospheric winter-to-summer circulation that is driven by wave dissipation and that it plays a significant role in trace gas distributions in the mesosphere and lower thermosphere, and in the composition of the thermosphere.

The NASA Global-scale Observations of the Limb and Disk (GOLD) mission is a dual-channel imaging spectrograph that will be carried on a commercial communications satellite in geostationary orbit. Launch is scheduled for January, 2018.

Plain Language Summary or Abstract: Gravity wave forcing near the mesopause drives a summer-to-winter residual circulation in the mesosphere and a reversed, lower thermospheric winter-to-summer residual circulation.

The NASA Ionospheric Connection explorer (ICON) will study the coupling between the thermosphere and ionosphere at low- and mid-latitudes by measuring the key parameters.

This paper investigates a possible physical mechanism of the observed dayside high-latitude upper thermospheric wind using numerical simulations from the coupled magnetosphere-ionosphere-thermosphere (CMIT) model.