OH Airglow for Ionospheric Seismology Applications—From Instrumental Noise Characterization to Rayleigh Waves Detection Threshold

Abstract Airglow layers are powerful tracers of upper‐atmosphere dynamics because of their sensitivity to a broad spectrum of atmospheric wave phenomena. Seismic activity, and in particular Rayleigh waves, constitutes a forcing mechanism capable of generating infrasonic waves in the atmosphere. These seismically forced disturbances amplify as they propagate upward owing to the exponential decrease in atmospheric density, leading to significant perturbations at ionospheric altitudes. Although the theoretical observability of Rayleigh‐wave‐induced atmospheric signatures in airglow has been discussed previously, no study has yet quantified the realistic detection thresholds achievable on Earth using ground‐based airglow imaging under real observational conditions. Here, we address this gap by presenting an end‐to‐end methodology aimed at enabling the first detection of seismic signatures in the OH airglow layer near 87 km altitude. The approach covers the full observational chain, from instrument characterization and noise quantification to dedicated preprocessing, filtering, and analysis techniques tailored to the weak but coherent nature of Rayleigh‐wave‐induced perturbations. We model the expected airglow response from a representative large earthquake ( 8.0) at teleseismic distance and inject this signal into real airglow observations acquired under typical noise conditions. Applying the full processing workflow to these synthetic data sets allows us to assess detectability, quantify instrumental and environmental limitations, and establish practical detection thresholds. Together, these results lay the groundwork for airglow‐based investigations of seismic‐atmospheric coupling and broaden the scope of optical techniques in ionospheric seismology.