An Application Study Of The Wuhan Meteor Radar In Space Environment Sounding

The meteor radar is one kind of important spatial sounding techniques, and theobserved objects of the meteor radar during the initial stages are mainly the meteorshower and its correlative astronomic issues. During the 40's of the past century themeteor radar started to be applied in the observations of the upper atmosphericdynamics. The all-sky meteor radar recently developed was the newest generation ofmeteor radars, and the Wuhan all-sky meteor radar installed at the beginning of 2002is the first meteor radar system in mainlined of China. At present, the main objectsobserved by the modem meteor radar are the atmospheric dynamics in the meteorregions, these some extremely typical research topics including atmosphericaveraging wind fields, atmospheric tides and atmospheric planet waves. In order toexcavate the exploration potential of the meteor radar fully, this thesis attempted todevelop some applications of the meteor radar in other fields by using the Wuhanmeteor radar, which mainly include the dynamical instability survey of upperatmosphere, the observations of the meteor shower and the meteor speed duringmeteor showers.First, one year data including wind field and temperature from May, 2003 toApril, 2004 based on the Wuhan meteor radar, combining with MSISOO modelatmosphere are utilized to exhibit dynamical instability seasonal characteristics of theupper atmosphere in Wuhan. The atmosphere presents a lower stability from Januaryto March, with Richardson Number (Ri) smaller than 0.25, indicating possibleoccurrence of dynamical instabilities; and displays a very high stability conditionfrom June to August, with Ri larger than 1. The vertical wind shears in this period arealso analyzed, with the peak value similarly appearing from January to March,indicating that it is the wind shear but not the temperature vertical gradient thatinduces the atmospheric dynamical instabilities. The interaction between gravity waveand tide possibly is a primary factor of determining the atmospheric dynamicalinstabilities, occurring in which the critical level effect possibly is one kind of important mechanism.Moreover, the Quadrantid meteor shower and the meteor speed during the periodof this meteor shower are successfully observed using the Wuhan meteor radar for thefirst time, and then the correlative questions of observing meteor shower using theall-sky meteor radar are also discussed. The observational result shows that thisQuadrantid meteor shower occurs between 0 o'clock to 8 o'clock in January 4th, 2004of local time, with meteor echoes peaking at 4 o'clock. Moreover the meteor showerradiant derived from the meteor echoes plane, which is formed by the whole meteorechoes observed by the meteor radar during this shower, coincides well with thetheoretic radiant of this meteor shower. The meteor speeds during this period arecalculated by the amplitude Fresnel oscillation method of the meteor echoes, and thenthe meteor speed distribution is analyzed. The meteor speed observed during thisshower mainly concentrated between 10～30km/s, which is discovered to be controlledby the meteor initial velocity entering earth's atmosphere combined with the meteordecelerating process in the atmosphere. Finally the meteor speed variation with theheight is studied, from which the decelerating effects of the earth's atmosphere on themeteor bodies are discussed.In brief, this paper discusses the application research results of the Wuhan all-skymeteor radar in some meteor radar's unconventional fields, which is capable ofexhibiting extremely formidable detection ability of the meteor radar and itsdevelopment prospects. But here this thesis merely performs some very preliminaryresearch work, and more significant following works will be anticipated in the further.