Until about a decade ago the earth’s upper atmosphere was conventionally treated to be influenced by solar radiation. Owing to primarily the very low solar activity of cycle 24, several new insights have emerged in the recent past on the upper atmospheric influence with respect to both solar and lower atmospheric forcings owing to continuous and systematic measurements of optical daytime airglow emission measurements at multiple wavelengths carried out during 2000 – 2006 and from 2010 – present. It is seen that during high solar activity the daytime airglow emission intensities vary with the variation in the solar flux indicating an unambiguous signature of solar forcing on the upper atmosphere. With reduction in the solar activity, large scale (planetary-size) waves from the lower atmosphere show their influence in the upper atmospheric parameters such as the optical emission intensities and GPS-TEC. Whereas, in the smaller scale (e.g., gravity wave) regime number of waves in the upper atmosphere increase with the increase in solar activity. With regard to the diurnal variability of the optical emissions, there seems to be a reasonable symmetric behaviour with respect to noon during low solar activity period, whereas their behaviour seems asymmetric during high solar activity, which is attributed to be due to the greater electrodynamical influence of the equatorial processes in the low-latitude ionosphere thermosphere system. These new results obtained recently reveal greater insights into the fundamental nature of coupling between the thermospheric regions in the daytime and their solar activity dependence.