Research Article Airglow Measurements of Gravity Wave Propagation and Damping over Kolhapur (16.5 ∘ N, 74.2 ∘ E) R. N. Ghodpage, 1 A. Taori, 2 P. T. Patil, 1 S. Gurubaran, 3 A. K. Sharma, 4 S. Nikte, 4 and D. Nade 4,5 1 MF Radar, Indian Institute of Geomagnetism, Kolhapur 416004, India 2 National Atmospheric Research Laboratory, Gadanki 517112, India 3 Indian Institute of Geomagnetism, Navi Mumbai 410218, India 4 Department of Physics, Shivaji University, Kolhapur 416004, India 5 Department of Physics, Sanjay Ghodawat Group of Institutions, Atigre, Kolhapur 41611, India Correspondence should be addressed to A. Taori; alok.taori@gmail.com Received 1 May 2014; Revised 12 June 2014; Accepted 12 June 2014; Published 7 July 2014 Academic Editor: Steve Milan Copyright © 2014 R. N. Ghodpage et al. his is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Simultaneous mesospheric OH and O ( 1 S) night airglow intensity measurements from Kolhapur (16.8 ∘ N, 74.2 ∘ E) reveal unambiguous gravity wave signatures with periods varying from 01 hr to 9 hr with upward propagation. he amplitudes growth of these waves is found to vary from 0.4 to 2.2 while propagating from the OH layer (∼87 km) to the O ( 1 S) layer (∼97 km). We ind that vertical wavelength of the observed waves increases with the wave period. he damping factors calculated for the observed waves show large variations and that most of these waves were damped while traveling from the OH emission layer to the O ( 1 S) emission layer. he damping factors for the waves show a positive correlation at vertical wavelengths shorter than 40km, while a negative correlation at higher vertical wavelengths. We note that the damping factors have stronger positive correlation with meridional wind shears compared to the zonal wind shears. 1. Introduction Upward propagation of gravity waves and tides is an impor- tant aspect in studying dynamical coupling between diferent regions in earth’s atmosphere (e.g., [1]). hough the negative density gradient and conservation of energy suggest that the amplitudes of these waves grow exponentially with altitudes, dissipation processes (such as saturation and interaction of these waves with background wind and other waves) limit the amplitude growth of these waves (e.g., [2]). Information on these gravity waves and tides in upper mesosphere is con- sidered important because of their potential association with ionospheric phenomena [3–9]. Passive airglow monitoring is a simple and cost efective method which provides required temporal resolution to study the short period gravity waves with periodicity. In particular, OH (peak emission altitude ∼87 km), O 2 (peak emission altitude ∼94 km), and O ( 1 S) (peak emission altitude ∼97 km) emissions are oten utilized to measure and characterize the upper mesospheric gravity waves (e.g., [10–12]). Upward propagating gravity waves with vertical wavelengths larger than the airglow layer thickness (typical full width at half maxima, 10 km) can be observed at multiple airglow emissions almost simultaneously. Such data can be used to estimate the amplitude growth and the propagation characteristics of gravity waves [13–15]. Taori et al. [16] utilized more than two years of OH and O 2 temperature data from Maui (20.8 ∘ N, 156.2 ∘ W) to study the amplitude growth for long as well as short period waves and found strong dissipation during summer time. Recently, Liu and Swenson [17] and Vargas et al. [18] provided a numerical model to study gravity wave induced oscillations in the airglow emission intensity and temperatures where they suggested the wave amplitudes have the following relation:   = 0  (1−)/2 . (1) Hindawi Publishing Corporation International Journal of Geophysics Volume 2014, Article ID 514937, 9 pages http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2014/514937