A meteoroid stream survey using meteor head echo observations from the Middle Atmosphere ALOMAR Radar System (MAARSY)

Abstract

Results from a meteor head echo shower survey using the quasi continuous meteor observations of the high power large aperture radar MAARSY, located in northern Norway (69.30°N, 16.04°E) are presented. The data set comprises 760 000 head echoes detected during two and half years sensitive to an effective limiting masses below 10−8 kg. Using a wavelet shower search algorithm, we identified 33 meteor showers in the data set all of which are found in the IAU meteor shower catalog. We find ∼ 1% of all measured head echoes at these masses are associated with meteor showers. Comparison of shower radiants from this survey with the observation of the Canadian Meteor Orbit radar (CMOR) transverse scattering radar system shows generally good agreement, although there are large differences in the measured durations of some meteor showers. Differential mass indices (s) of ∼ 1.5–1.6 are measured for the Perseids (PER), Geminids (GEM) and Quadrantids (QUA) showers. The Orionids (ORI) show a much steeper mass index of 2.0, in agreement with other observations at small particle sizes, suggesting the Halleyid showers, in particular, are rich in very small meteoroids.