Meteor trail advection and dispersion; preliminary lidar observations

Abstract

Sodium resonance lidar observations of meteor ablation trails at the Arecibo Observatory (18.30° N, 66.75° W) are presented. Of particular interest is the event of 23 March 1998, during the Coqui II sounding rocket campaign. On this date, the lidar was operating with two beams probing different volumes of the sodium layer separated zonally by 15.7 ± 0.8 km. A single meteor trail was observed near 89 km altitude in both lidar field-of-views with a 310 ± 50 s temporal displacement. This observational separation suggested a westward zonal wind of 50 ± 10 m/s, while trail dispersion yielded an upper bound for the total diffusion coefficient of 2.6 ± 0.5 m2/s which is consistent with dispersion seen in other trails. The data supports the need for future observation with systems specialized for meteor detection.