top of page
JChau_2018.jpeg

Prof. Jorge Chau

University of Rostock and Head of the Radar Remote Sensing Department at the Leibniz Institute of Atmospheric Physics in Kühlungsborn, Germany

Studies of mesospheric and lower thermospheric turbulence and waves with novel multi-static MIMO specular meteor radars

J. L. Chau1, J. Vierinen2, J. M. Urco1, and T. Weber3

1Leibniz Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Rostock University, Kühlungsborn, Germany,

2UiT, The Arctic University of Norway, Tromso, Norway

3University of Rostock, Germany

 

Typical specular meteor radars (SMRs) use 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 novel SMR systems using multiple transmitters in interferometric configuration, each of them employing orthogonal pseudorandom coded transmitted sequences. After proper decoding, the angle of departure (AOD) of the detected meteor echoes with respect to the transmitter site are obtained at each receiving

antenna. We show that the proposed configurations are good alternatives to explore the MLT region. Besides the improved temporal and altitudinal resolutions using standard analysis, we describe a new method for estimating the three-dimensional mesospheric wind field correlation function from specular meteor trails.  The proposed method allows also the estimation of the spatial and temporal spectra as well as their structure functions.   Based on observations from a special SMR MIMO campaign (SIMONe 2018), we estimated the second order structure functions, which are found to be compatible with the Kolmogorov prediction for spectral distribution of kinetic energy in the turbulent inertial range. Plans for deploying this type of systems in southern Argentina and central Peru will be also presented.

imagechau.jpg

References

 

Chau, J. L., J. M. Urco, J. P. Vierinen, R. A. Volz, M. Clahsen, N. Pfeffer, and J. Trautner, Novel specular meteor radar systems using coherent MIMO techniques to study the mesosphere and lower thermosphere, Atmos. Meas. Tech. Discuss.,  https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-2018-287, 2018.

 

Vierinen, J., J. L. Chau, H. Charuvil Asokan, J. Urco, M. Clahsen, V. Avsarkisov, R. Marino, and R. Volz, "Observing mesospheric turbulence with specular meteor radars: A novel method for estimating second order statistics of wind velocity", Earth and Space Sciences, submitted, 2019.

 

An updated list of publications can be found at http://scholar.google.com.pe/citations?user=NLi-cCkAAAAJ&hl=en

bottom of page