Microshower structure of the meteor complex

Abstract

Meteor radar observations of ionized trails in the Earth's atmosphere provide observations that do not depend on weather conditions and time of day and provide good statistics for analysis. Further development in the new quasitomographic analysis of the goniometric data of the Kazan meteoric radar has revealed a number of very weak meteoric streams with rates of more than 5-6 meteors per day. In addition to the known large meteor showers, we have found up to as many as 1000 small showers per month that we have named microshowers. We shall operationally define a microshower as the minimal meteoric stream which can be detected with the Kazan meteoric radar while quasitomographic procedures of processing interferometer data are used. © Springer Science+Business Media, Inc. 2005.