Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Moorhead, Althea V.
• Brown, Peter G.
• Campbell-Brown, Margaret D.
• Heynen, Denis
• Cooke, William J.

Titel

Fully correcting the meteor speed distribution for radar observing biases

Ist Teil von

• Planetary and space science, 2017-09, Vol.143, p.209-217

Ort / Verlag

Elsevier Ltd

Erscheinungsjahr

2017

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Elsevier ScienceDirect Journals

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Meteor radars such as the Canadian Meteor Orbit Radar (CMOR) have the ability to detect millions of meteors, making it possible to study the meteoroid environment in great detail. However, meteor radars also suffer from a number of detection biases; these biases must be fully corrected for in order to derive an accurate description of the meteoroid population. We present a bias correction method for patrol radars that accounts for the full form of ionization efficiency and mass distribution. This is an improvement over previous methods such as that of Taylor (1995), which requires power-law distributions for ionization efficiency and a single mass index. We apply this method to the meteor speed distribution observed by CMOR and find a significant enhancement of slow meteors compared to earlier treatments. However, when the data set is severely restricted to include only meteors with very small uncertainties in speed, the fraction of slow meteors is substantially reduced, indicating that speed uncertainties must be carefully handled. •Ionization-limited meteor detections must be debiased to obtain mass-limited population characteristics.•We present a bias correction method for patrol radars that accounts for modern descriptions of ionization efficiency.•Our method yields a meteor speed distribution that is slower than previous analyses of similar data.