A comparison of meteor radar systems at Buckland Park

Abstract

This paper describes a comparison of two meteor radar systems operated simultaneously from June 29 to July 15, 1994, at the Buckland Park field station near Adelaide, Australia (35°S, 138°E). Both meteor systems operate on a narrow-beam VHF wind profiler. The first meteor system was developed by the atmospheric physics group at the University of Adelaide. The second meteor system was the University of Colorado's meteor echo detection and collection (MEDAC) system. The goal of the campaign was to determine how closely the two similar meteor systems performed with regards to the detection of meteor trail echoes and the estimation of the Doppler frequencies. Classification of the signals in the resulting data set showed that a number of the echoes, including a class of echoes that appear to be from meteors traveling straight down the beam, were from sources other than under dense meteor trails. When the nonunder dense echoes were operated on by the Doppler frequency estimators, widely varying estimates between the two systems were produced. Only when taking into careful consideration the details of the detection routines, the signal composition of the data set, and performance characteristics of the Doppler estimators was the comparison satisfactory.