Reflection properties of meteor trails in a forward-scatter radar experiment

Summary The distribution of the energy reflected by a meteor trail is strongly connected to the ionization density distribution across and along a meteor trail. Recent forward-scatter observations over the Bologna-Lecce baseline in Italy carried out in 1991–92, show that the number of underdense meteor trails (with electron line densityq≤2.10¹⁴ electrons/mvs. peak signal amplitudes decreases more rapidly with the increasing signal level than what predicted. An exponential (simple and/or log-normal) model is proposed, by taking into account different signal-to-noise ratio thresholds and the Kolmogorov-Smirnov (K-S) procedure is used to test the overall goodness of fit between the set of observations and specified theoretical distributions. It is shown that this model provides a better fit to data mainly for middle-high levels of received power and for values ofq≥10¹³ electrons/m.