The earth’s upper atmosphere has been studied for over a century now, and while a multitude of data has been collected studying the plasma in the ionosphere, there are not equivalent amounts of data on neutrals in the thermosphere to pair with these plasma observations. The Remote Equatorial Nighttime Observatory for Ionospheric Regions (RENOIR) project consists of two observing systems stationed in northeastern Brazil in Cajazeiras (6.87◦S, 38.56◦W) and Cariri (7.38◦S, 36.52◦W) since 2009. They are separated by 232.28 km and each is equipped with a Fabry-Perot interferometer (FPI) to measure neutral wind velocities and neutral temperatures using observations of the 630.0-nm emission caused by the dissociative recombination of O +2. The FPI systems can operate in two different modes: cardinal and common volume (CV). In cardinal mode, each FPI looks at a 45◦ elevation angle t...

A one-year dataset spanning March 2011-March 2012 of coincident observations of night time thermospheric zonal neutral winds, equatorial plasma bubble (EPB) velocities, and zonal plasma drifts are used to examine the relationship between the thermosphere and ionosphere near the geomagnetic equator over Peru. Thermospheric neutral winds are determined by using a bistatic Fabry–Perot interferometer (FPI) experiment located at Merihill and Nazca in Peru. The ambient plasma drift velocities were obtained using the incoherent scatter radar at the Jicamarca Radio Observatory in Peru. The EPB zonal velocities were estimated utilizing images of the OI 630.0-nm emission recorded by a narrow-field optical imaging system at the Cerro Tololo InterAmerican Observatory in Chile. The joint analysis of these datasets illustrates that the night time and night-to-night variations in the zonal neutral wi...