Work

The SuperDARN Meteor Wind Product: A 31-year archive with modeled altitude contributions and validation

Year: 2026

Type: article

Abstract: Radar echoes from meteor plasma trails constitute one of the main sources of observations of winds in the mesosphere-lower thermosphere. A new 31-year archive of meteor wind observations has been prepared from data taken at 38 Super Dual Auroral Radar Network (SuperDARN) sites, covering 1993–2024. These observations are not height-resolved, and so an empirical meteor model has been produced to estimate the altitude contribution function, in other words the meteor count distribution. The meteor count model RMSEs were estimated at 0.67 km for the peak height and 1.53 km for the full width at half maximum, based on a validation against independent meteor radar data. The SuperDARN wind observations have been compared against nearby dedicated meteor radar data, with the meteor profiles averaged using the observed count distribution, and against JAWARA reanalysis winds using the new meteor count model. Two case-study comparisons were performed: one for the Andenes meteor radar versus Hankasalmi SuperDARN radar in 2008, and one for the McMurdo meteor radar versus McMurdo SuperDARN radar in 2019. The three datasets were found to be in moderate to strong agreement, with correlations ranging from 0.73–0.90 for the comparison of SuperDARN against the meteor radars and 0.45–0.70 for the comparison of SuperDARN against JAWARA. A summertime equatorward mean flow of 5–15 m s −1 was identified in the northern hemisphere SuperDARN data, consistent with previous reports.

Source: Annales Geophysicae

DOI: 10.5194/angeo-44-1315-2026