An air mass transported by a wind field will become distorted over time by any gradients present in the wind field. To study this effect in Earth's thermosphere, we examine the behavior of a simple parameter that we describe here as the "distortion gradient." It incorporates all of the wind field's departures from uniformity and is thus capable of representing all contributions to the distortion or mixing of air masses. The distortion gradient is defined such that it is always positive, so averaging over time and/or space does not suppress small-scale features. Conventional gradients, by contrast, are signed quantities that would often average to zero. To analyze the climatological behavior of this distortion gradient, we used three years (2010, 2011, and 2012) of thermospheric F region wind observations from a high-latitude ground-based all-sky wavelength scanning Doppler Fabry-Perot interferometer located at Poker Flat Alaska. Climatological averaging of the distortion gradient allowed us to investigate its diurnal and seasonal (annual) behaviors at our observing location. Distortion was observed to be higher before local magnetic midnight and to be seasonally dependent. While maximum distortion occurred before local magnetic midnight under all geomagnetic conditions, the peak distortion occurred earlier under moderate geomagnetic conditions as compared to the quiet geomagnetic conditions and even earlier still when geomagnetic conditions were active. Peak distortion was stronger and appeared earlier when interplanetary magnetic field (IMF) was southward compared to northward. By contrast, we could not resolve any time-shift effect due to the IMF component tangential to Earth's orbit.
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