Meteors enter earth's atmosphere with a great amount of kinetic energy. As a result of this atmospheric contact, many meteors will be burned up before they can make it to earth's surface, but not before they cause atmospheric disturbances. The SuperDARN HF radar is designed to measure the ionosphere, typically to create hemisphere wide maps of ionospheric plasma convection, but meteor events are attributed to noise experienced in its data. This thesis first brings together plasma physics understanding with currently available research to clarify the physical behaviors that must be considered to evaluate radar data. The implications of this towards SuperDARN findings is examined in two parts. First, how a meteor's atmospheric interaction is recorded by the SuperDARN HF radar is evaluated. To do this, the physical interaction the meteor has with the atmosphere is examined from the sub-atomic to atmospheric scale. Previous research that used other radars to find these interactions is analyzed to create an understanding of a possible SuperDARN HF radar outcome and provide a new comparison of radars. This understanding is compared against meteor event and location based SuperDARN data to select an optimal event. The second part of the SuperDARN analysis reviews meteor event options based on the time and location of a meteor event meeting defined parameters. Common SuperDARN analysis tools are applied. The data saved by SuperDARN is examined for unique results. Finally, the practicality and meaning of results is considered. / Master of Science / SuperDARN radars emits radio waves that reflect within earth's ionosphere to study how it changes. The ionosphere is a part of earth's upper atmosphere; many of the atoms there are hydrogen and helium. Lower in earth's atmosphere, the sun's energy is just felt as heat that gets dissipated at night or when clouds move in front of the sun. In the thin upper atmosphere, this energy does not transfer as easily, so the atoms ionize to store energy as charge. This can occur lower down in earth's atmosphere, such as when a hypersonic traveling meteor impacts the air with a lot of energy. This ionized trail of atoms behind a meteor is called a meteor trail. Just as the ionosphere can reflect some radio waves, meteor trails can reflect radio waves. It was questionable how well these reflections could be found in SuperDARN data since that radar looks over a large area and meteor trails are comparatively small. This research seeks to answer that. Current research on meteor trails and analysis with radar was analyzed along with a review of the underlying physics concepts involved. Once this background is established, actual SuperDARN radar data is analyzed for a time and place that gives the best chance of seeing some change as a result of a meteor trail.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:VTETD/oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/119438 |
| Date | 13 June 2024 |
| Creators | Stewart, Evan Wayne |
| Contributors | Electrical Engineering, Black, Jonathan T., Jones, Creed Farris, Baker, Joseph Benjamin |
| Publisher | Virginia Tech |
| Source Sets | Virginia Tech Theses and Dissertation |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | ETD, application/pdf, application/x-zip-compressed |
| Rights | Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ |
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