Polarization Effects of Transverse Scatter Meteor and Trail Evolution for Various Collision Frequencies - Theory and Observations

Abstract

Transverse scatter meteor radar observations have become a standard tool to study the mesosphere/lower thermosphere dynamics as well asthe meteor Earth environment. Although the basic scattering theory from meteor trails has been known for several decades, quantitative calculations remained challenging. In 1977 Poulter and Baggeley developed the full wave scattering theory to describe the scattering from a cylindrical plasma column assuming a Gaussian radial electron density distribution and performed the first qualitative simulations. More recent scattering simulations using the FDTD approach to model the scattering from meteor head echoes provided qualitative radar cross-sections for various plasma distributions. Leveraging the full wave scattering model and the plasma distributions used for the head echo observations, it was possible to obtain reflection coefficients for transverse scatter meteor trails.