Specular Meteor Radar Performance and Coverage Quantified Using Monte Carlo Simulation

Using the plasma trail of meteors as tracers of opportunity, specular meteor radar (SMR) remains one of the few tools able to provide spatially and temporally dense wind measurements in the Mesosphere and Lower thermosphere (70-100 km). SMRs have recently evolved from commercial monostatic systems into multiple-in, multiple-out (MIMO) distributed networks of separated transmitters (TX) and receivers (RX). Understanding the performance and coverage of these networks enables more informed network architecture and node placement, but little effort has been made so far to quantify the coverage or performance of separated meteor radar systems.

This work uses Monte Carlo simulations of meteor radar echoes to investigate the relative performance of differently separated transmit-receive SMR links. The power reflected from a transmitter off a meteor with known geometric and plasma properties to a receiver can be estimated using a quasi-specular scattering model. A population of meteors with properties following known or empirically derived distributions are used to estimate the spatial coverage, daily meteor count, and observation density of increasingly separated TX-RX links. These simulations' estimated distributions and counts are validated against five years of meteors meteor observations using a monostatic meteor radar in McMurdo Station, Antarctica.