Preliminary analysis of the observations from the meteor radar installed at King Sejoing station, Antarctica

Abstract

A meteor radar was installed at King Sejong station (62°13′S, 58°47′W), Antarctica in March 2007 for real time observation of meteors. When a meteor enters the atmosphere it rapidly vaporizes leaving behind a trail of ionized gas along its path of travel. Meteor radar transmits VHF radio wave (33.2 MHz) with the power of 8 kw and detects reflected signals from the trail of the ionized gas with 5 coherent receiver channels at the same time. Altitude and direction of meteors are observed in near-real time by analyzing amplitudes and phases of the signals detected on the receiving antennas. A preliminary result of the observations shows a very sensitive performance of the radar detecting more than 1000 meteors for an hour. Through the continuous observations for 24 hours per day, it is measuring temporal and spatial distributions of meteors over the Antarctica. The resulting height distribution of meteors shows the Gaussian distribution between 70 km and 110 km with the peak altitude of about 90 km. These 24-hour continuous observations of meteors will produce a temporal statistical data set of meteors over the Antarctica, as a fundamental dataset for the meteor astronomy. Furthermore, continuous measurements of meteor signals will allow to compute neutral winds and temperature at altitudes of 70 ~ 110 km in the upper atmosphere by detecting directions and diffusion coefficients of the ionized gases, respectively. In particular, with imaging observations of the waves in airglow layers, these measurements of neutral winds can be utilized to study the propagation processes of the waves in the upper atmosphere. Also, temperature measurements from the meteor radar can be compared with the temperature measurements from the observations of the OH airglow emission, which will allow to perform a systematic study of temperature changes in the upper atmosphere over the Antarctica.