Global Variation of Meteor Trail Plasma Turbulence

Every day the Earth is impacted by billions of micrometeoroids. For over a decade researchers have speculated that many if not all of the resulting trails were subject to plasma turbulence and non-laminar evolution. In an effort to understand this problem we present the first global simulations on the occurrence of meteor trail plasma irregularities. Understanding meteor trail plasma turbulence is important because turbulent meteor trails are visible as non-specular trails to coherent radars, and turbulence influences the evolution of specular radar meteor trails, particularly regarding the inference of mesospheric temperatures from trail diffusion rates, and their usage for meteor burst communication. We will discuss the significant effect that neutral atmospheric winds and density, and ionospheric plasma density have on the variability of meteor trail evolution and the observation of non-specular meteor trails, and demonstrate that trails are far less likely to become and remain turbulent in daylight, explaining several observational trends using non-specular and specular meteor trails.