The 1996 Leonid shower as studied with a potassium lidar: Observations and inferred meteoroid sizes

We report on the observation and analysis of meteor trails that are detected by ground‐based lidar tuned to the D 1 fine structure line of K. The lidar is located at Kühlungsborn, Germany. The echo profiles are analyzed with a temporal resolution of about 1 s and altitude resolution of 200 m. Identification of meteor trails in the large archive of raw data is performed with help of an automated computer search code. During the peak of the Leonid meteor shower on the morning of November 17, 1996, we observed seven meteor trails between 0245 and 0445 UT. Their mean altitude was 89.0 km. The duration of observation of individual trails ranges from 3 s to ∼30 min. We model the probability of observing a meteor trail by ground‐based lidar as a function of both altitude distribution and duration of the trails. These distributions depend on the mass distribution, entry velocity, and entry angle of the meteoroids, on the altitude‐dependent chemical and dynamical lifetimes of the released K atom, and on the absolute detection sensitivity of our lidar experiment. From the modeling, we derive the statistical likelihood of detection of trails from meteoroids of a particular size. These bracket quite well the observed trails. The model also gives estimates of the probable size of the meteoroids based on characteristics of individual trails.