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We address the question of the ability of empirical and general circulationmodel neutral wind profiles in the lower thermosphere to reproduce theobserved characteristics of the winds in that part of the atmosphere. Thewinds in that altitude range are critical for electrodynamic processes, butevaluations of the model winds are generally difficult because of the sparseobservational data, which makes an evaluation of the wind predictions overlarge areas difficult or impossible. In this paper, we use a recentlyidentified characteristic of the winds in the lower thermosphere, namely theenhanced winds and strong shears between 95 and 115 km altitude, as a test ofthe models, at least in a statistical sense. Our results show that theHorizontal Wind Model (HWM) significantly underestimates the maximum windsand shears in the lower thermosphere, although it has reasonable agreementwith the average winds. The NCAR general circulation model used in this studyalso underestimates the maximum winds and shears significantly when run withstandard resolution, as well as producing an unrealistic increase of the windspeed with height. The agreement between the model and the observationsimproves significantly however, in a statistical sense, when the altituderesolution is increased. The improved height resolution in the model appearsto produce a greater improvement in the model predictions than any of theother factors that we examined, such as improving the geomagnetic forcing orthe forcing at the lower boundary

Accuracy issues of the existing thermospheric wind models: can we rely on them in seeking solutions to wind-driven problems?