Thermospheric neutral wind measurements and investigations across the African region—A review

The literature includes a review of the observations of neutral winds over five African locations using the Fabry-Perot Interferometer (FPI), and the comparison between the FPI observations and predictions of the horizontal wind model (HWM-14). So far, there are reports of FPI thermospheric wind measurements in South Africa and Morocco representing the mid-latitude regions in the southern and northern hemispheres, respectively.

Within the low latitudes, FPI instruments are installed in the Ivory Coast, Ethiopia, and Nigeria. For the literature reviewed, the years covered in the FPI data are 2018-2019 (South Africa), 2016-2017 (Nigeria), 2015-2016 (Ethiopia), 2013-2016 (Morocco), and 1994-1995 (Ivory Coast). Overall, the HWM-14 reproduces the climatological behavior of the meridional and zonal winds, with varying levels of fidelity for the different regions.