Automated Detection and Climatological Analysis of Ripple-Scale Gravity Wave Instabilities Using a Squeeze-and-Excitation Convolutional Neural Network
All-sky OH airglow imaging provides two-dimensional observations of mesospheric wave morphology near the nominal OH emission peak altitude. Small, localized ripple-like structures are difficult to catalogue consistently through manual inspection and may represent either instability-related features or secondary gravity waves. We present an automated detection framework based on a squeeze-and-excitation convolutional neural network (SE-CNN) trained on 41 x 41-pixel patches extracted from 512 x 512-pixel all-sky images acquired at Yucca Ridge Field Station. Signed differences between consecutive images separated by approximately 2 min are normalized using spatial median-absolute-deviation scaling before classification. The trained model is applied to complete images through sliding-window inference, followed by score-map reconstruction, component filtering, and spatial matching. On the held-out patch test set, the classifier achieved an accuracy of 0.92, precision of 0.89, recall of 0.93, and F1 score of 0.92. Within a selected cohort of manually positive validation frames, 299 of 415 evaluable frames contained at least one reference-automated spatial overlap, and 324 of 559 eligible reference supports received a one-to-one automated-component assignment. In a separate blinded single-reviewer audit of disagreement patches, 411 of 543 model-candidate/reference-unmarked crops were classified as clear ripple-like, corresponding to a clear-ripple fraction of 75.7% with a night-cluster bootstrap 95% interval of 70.4%-80.2%. Because the audit was restricted to selected disagreement cases from manually positive frames, this value is not an archive-wide precision estimate.