G. Cevolani et al., REFLECTION PROPERTIES OF METEOR TRAILS IN A FORWARD-SCATTER RADAR EXPERIMENT, Nuovo cimento della Societa italiana di fisica. C, Geophysics and space physics, 16(3), 1993, pp. 255-263
The distribution of the energy reflected by a meteor trail is strongly
connected to the ionization density distribution across and along a m
eteor trail. Recent forward-scatter observations over the Bologna-Lecc
e baseline in Italy carried out in 1991-92, show that the number of un
derdense meteor trails (with electron line density q less-than-or-equa
l-to 2.10(14) electrons/m vs. peak signal amplitudes decreases more ra
pidly with the increasing signal level than what predicted. An exponen
tial (simple and/or log-normal) model is proposed, by taking into acco
unt different signal-to-noise ratio thresholds and the Kolmogorov-Smir
nov (K-S) procedure is used to test the overall goodness of fit betwee
n the set of observations and specified theoretical distributions. It
is shown that this model provides a better fit to data mainly for midd
le-high levels of received power and for values of q greater-than-or-e
qual-to 10(13) electrons/M.