Abstract
Abstract. The Andenes specular meteor radar shows meteor trail diffusion rates increasing on average by about 10 % at times and locations where a lidar observes noctilucent clouds (NLCs). This high-latitude effect has been attributed to the presence of charged NLC after exploring possible contributions from thermal tides. To make this claim, the current study evaluates data from three stations at high, middle, and low latitudes for the years 2012 to 2016 to show that NLC influence on the meteor trail diffusion is independent of thermal tides. The observations also show that the meteor trail diffusion enhancement during NLC cover exists only at high latitudes and near the peaks of NLC layers. This paper discusses a number of possible explanations for changes in the regions with NLCs and leans towards the hypothesis that the relative abundance of background electron density plays the leading role. A more accurate model of the meteor trail diffusion around NLC particles would help researchers determine mesospheric temperature and neutral density profiles from meteor radars at high latitudes.
Highlights
The motion and diffusion of meteor trails depend sensitively upon the properties of the neutral atmosphere where they ablate
noctilucent clouds (NLCs) particle sizes are of tens of nanometers and they are much heavier compared to ambient constituents
From a local time composite, overall, the SMR-based diffusion has been found to be dominated by the semidiurnal tide at high latitudes and the diurnal tide at low latitudes
Summary
The motion and diffusion of meteor trails depend sensitively upon the properties of the neutral atmosphere where they ablate. Using chemistry based numerical simulation, Younger et al (2014) reported that the deionization of the meteor trail by three-body attachment (a chemical process) at altitudes below 90 km could be responsible for the deviation. They were open to contributions from background dusts, such as meteor smoke particles and noctilucent cloud (NLC). A study by Singer et al (2008) showed different behavior of the MTD coefficient profiles during NLC and non-NLC cases They noted that the strong and weak meteor-based separation does show a partly similar behavior, so they could not conclude clearly the contributions from NLC. The NLC occurrence has a local time or tidal dependence (Fiedler et al, 2011; Fiedler and Baumgarten, 2018; Gerding et al, 2013), which could bias the MTD segregation based on it
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