Robust Voltage Fitting Techniques for Meteor Doppler Speed Determination

The nonlinear least square fitting techniques that the authors have employed until recently for measuring the Doppler velocities of head-echo meteor returns have proven to be limited in their effectiveness under certain circumstances where significant incoherent scattering from the ionosphere is present. Two alternative methods developed to independently but jointly determine the Doppler speeds are presented. The first method uses the Moore-Penrose matrix inverse to obtain the relevant meteor parameters. The second method is the steepest descent searching technique. These techniques have been applied to simulated meteor returns as well as meteor data set from February 2001. The Doppler velocities obtained using the new algorithms are presented. The implications of the improved Doppler resolution as well as robustness of the new approach are also discussed