Polarimetric Meteor Radar

The Zephyr Meteor Radar Network is the first meteor radar system to digitize the complete polarimetric response of a meteor trail echo at each time step of observation. Unlike most conventional meteor radar systems that utilize circularly polarized signals to mitigate polarization losses due to the unknown linear orientation of a meteor's trail in the reflection plane, the Zephyr network employs dual-linear polarizations on both transmit and receive to observe a meteor trail’s full polarimetric response. While many commercial meteor radar systems have primarily focused on extracting wind velocity information from the echoes by utilizing only the echo location and body Doppler shift, the Zephyr network recognizes the value of radar polarimetry in gaining a comprehensive understanding of meteor trails as radio scatterers. Radar polarimetry applied to meteor radar has the potential to improve detection and enable more accurate discrimination with higher count rates, as well as enhance understanding of the physical characteristics of plasma trails, which can lead to new insights, and increase the scientific value of meteor radar data. This work gives a description of the Zephyr Meteor Radar Network and its implementation of orthogonal linear polarizations and coded continuous wave radar to enable simultaneous acquisition of a complete polarimetric scattering matrix at each time sample.