Long‐Term Distribution of Meteors in a Solar Cycle Period Observed by VHF Meteor Radars at Near‐Equatorial Latitudes

Abstract

We investigated meteor height and number of meteor echoes over a 13‐year observation period, with the data recorded by the meteor wind radar systems in Kototabang (0.20°S, 100.32°E) and Biak (1.17°S, 136.10°E), Indonesia. We aimed to investigate the changes in meteor peak height according to solar activity, represented by the solar radio index F10.7, and the number of solar sunspots, R, compared with the empirical results of the Mass Spectrometer Incoherent Scatter Extending (MSISE) and Committee on Space Research International Reference Atmosphere models. We found that (i) the daily meteor count rates at both sites in the period from 2003 to 2016 could be used to determine the dynamics in the upper atmosphere, where peak conditions occurred in the middle of the year; (ii) through a statistical approach using the normal distribution function, the variation in meteor peak height showed a positive correlation with the trend in solar activity; and (iii) comparison between the two empirical models and our observations showed two points where annual air density seemed to have a clear relationship with peak meteor height. In addition, the annual neutral density pattern of the model was related to the daily meteor count every year, although it showed a pattern opposite to the solar activity trends.

Mesospheric anomalous diffusion during noctilucent cloud scenarios

“…Elaborate technical details and working principles of this type of systems can be found in Hocking et al (2001). Specific technical details of the Biak system can be found in Batubara et al (2018). In this study we use the decay time information estimated from underdense meteor trails as described in Hocking et al (2001).…”

Mesopause temperatures and relative densities at midlatitudes observed by the Mengcheng meteor radar

“…For decades, meteor radars have been widely used for investigating the mesosphere and lower thermosphere (MLT) region, especially for investigating the neutral wind of the MLT region. Because of the advantages of continuous meteor radar measurements, meteor radar observations are widely used in detecting the dynamics and climate of the MLT region (Hall et al, 2012;Stober et al, 2012Stober et al, , 2014Holmen et al, 2016;Batubara et al, 2018;Yi W et al, 2019a). In addition to wind monitoring, meteor radars can be used to derive the neutral atmospheric temperature (Hocking et al, 1997;Hocking, 1999;Hall et al, 2006;Holdsworth et al, 2006;Yi W et al, 2014Yi W et al, , 2016Holmen et al, 2016;Lee et al, 2016;Liu LB et al, 2017b;Kam et al, 2019), pressure (Nielsen et al, 2001;Kumar, 2007), and density (Takahashi et al, 2002;Younger et al, 2015;Reid et al, 2017;Yi W et al, 2017Yi W et al, , 2018Yi W et al, , 2019b.…”

Occurrence and Altitude of the Long‐Lived Nonspecular Meteor Trails During Meteor Showers at High Latitudes

“…In addition, generation and evolution of meteor trails may depend on atmospheric composition and properties of meteoroids, which will be discussed in section 4. Annual and year‐to‐year changes of the meteor height distributions were presented by, for example, Lima et al (2015) and Batubara et al (2018), who studied data from meteor radars (MRs) located at low latitudes to look for effects of solar activity. Lukianova et al (2018) investigated annual variations of the height of ionized trails using 9 years (2008–2017) of data from the high‐latitude MR located at Sodankylä Geophysical Observatory (SGO, Finland).…”