Modeling the meteor head echo using Arecibo radar observations

Abstract

This paper reports results obtained using a combined set of models to determine meteoroid properties by comparing expected and observed meteor head-echo signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and line-of-sight Doppler velocity as measured in high-power and large-aperture (HPLA) radar observations. For this task we model: (1) meteor ablation and ionization processes, (2) meteor head-echo radar cross-section (RCS), (3) the radar equation, and (4) the radar antenna gain pattern, together with an automated least-squares fitting procedure to estimate meteoroid and observation parameters (i.e. aspect angle, location within the radar beam, etc.). We compared our simulated results with 236 head-echo events observed using the Arecibo 430 MHz radar in Puerto Rico. We found good agreement between modeled and observed SNR versus meteor altitude profiles for a broad range of head-echo observations. We also find reasonable agreement between meteoroid mass distributions resulting from these models and estimated using dynamical arguments, with the dynamical mass generally resulting in lower values by about 1–2 orders of magnitude. A characteristic of our methodology is that we can trace back the original mass and velocity of the meteoroid “above” the atmosphere (∼150 km altitude) required to produce the observed meteors. We find that, the original mass is required to be, on average, 1–2 orders of magnitude larger than that at the time of observation, and 3 orders of magnitude larger than estimated using dynamical equations. These results suggest that many meteor head echoes are observed towards the end of the particle's life, which has significant implications for the use of these observations for the determination of meteoroid properties. The automated fitting procedure is very sensitive to the antenna pattern, and therefore allows for precise estimates of the location of the meteoroid's trajectory within the Arecibo radar beam. The results indicate a noticeable, but weak, dependence between the distance of the particle's trajectory from the center of the beam (i.e. maximum gain) and the mass and velocity of the meteoroid. This suggests that the Arecibo radar is not particularly biased toward a specific velocity population of meteoroids (i.e. high velocity) as has been suggested in previous work.