We compare and examine diurnal temperature tides including their migrating component (DW1) from the troposphere to the lower mesosphere, using data from Thermosphere-Ionosphere-Mesosphere-Energetics and Dynamics/Sounding of the Atmosphere using Broadband Emission Radiometry (TIMED/SABER) and from six different reanalysis data sets: (1) the Modern Era Retrospective analysis for Research and Applications (MERRA), (2) the European Centre for Medium-range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) reanalysis (ERA-Interim) (3) the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) Climate Forecast System Reanalysis (CFSR), (4) the Japanese 25-year reanalysis by Japanese Meteorological Agency (JMA) and the Central Research Institute of Electric Power Industry (CRIEPI) (JRA25), (5) the NCEP/National Center for Atmospheric Research reanalysis (NCEP1), and (6) the NCEP and Department of Energy (DOE) Atmospheric Model Intercomparison Project (AMIP-II) reanalysis data (NCEP2). The horizontal and vertical structures of the diurnal tides in SABER and reanalyses reasonably agree, although the amplitudes are up to 30-50% smaller in the reanalyses than in the SABER in the upper stratosphere to lower mesosphere. Of all tidal components, the DW1 is dominant while a clear eastward propagating zonal wave number 3 component (DE3) is observed at midlatitudes of the Southern Hemisphere in winter. Among the six reanalyses, MERRA, ERA-Interim and CFSR are better at reproducing realistic diurnal tides. It is found that the diurnal tides extracted from SABER data in the winter-hemisphere stratosphere suffer from sampling issues that are caused by short-term variations of the background temperature. In addition, the GSWM underestimates the amplitude in the midlatitude upper stratosphere by about 50%. © 2012. American Geophysical Union.