Explains Wenbin Wang and others, previous studies have been devoted to examining the ionosphere and thermosphere response during the solar eclipse, but the post-eclipse response of the global ionosphere and thermosphere has not previously been well quantified.

It is commonly believed that solar eclipses have a great impact on the ionosphere-thermosphere (I-T) system within the eclipse shadow, but little attention has been paid to the global responses to them.

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.