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Novel specular meteor radar systems using coherent MIMO techniques to study the mesosphere and lower thermosphere

This paper is available in a repository.
This paper is available in a repository.

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Abstract

Typical specular meteor radars (SMRs) uses one transmitting antenna and at least a five-antenna interferometric configuration on reception to study the mesosphere and lower thermosphere (MLT) region. The interferometric configuration allows the measurement of the angle-of-arrival (AOA) of the detected meteor echoes, which in turn is needed to derive atmospheric parameters (e.g., mean winds, momentum fluxes, temperatures, and neutral densities). Recently, we have shown that coherent MIMO configurations in atmospheric radars, i.e., Multiple Input (transmitters) and Multiple Output (receivers), with proper diversity in transmission can be used to enhance interferometric atmospheric and ionospheric observations. In this study we present two novel SMR systems using multiple transmitters in interferometric configuration, each of them employing orthogonal pseudo-random coded transmitted sequences. After proper decoding, the AOAs of the detected meteor echoes with respect to the transmitter site are obtained at each antenna of the receiver site. We present successful implementations of (1) five transmitters and one receiver using coded continuous wave (CW) (MISO-CW), and (2) five transmitters and five receivers using coded CW (MIMO-CW). The latter system allows simultaneous independent observations of the specular meteor trails with respect to the transmitter and with respect to the receiver. The quality of the obtained results is evaluated in terms of the resulting mean winds, the number of detections and the daily diffusion trail versus altitude behavior. We show that the proposed configurations can increase the number of meteor detections, thereby improving the quality of atmospheric estimates, and obtain new atmospheric parameters (e.g., horizontal divergence, vorticity, etc.), particularly when combined with multi-static approaches. The use of multiple collocated transmitters for interferometric AOA determination makes building a multi-static radar network logistically easier, as only one receiver antenna is sufficient for interferometric measurements.

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