The Volumetric Emission Structure of Meteor Trails

Every day, ∼10⁴ kg of planetary and interplanetary material ablates in Earth’s atmosphere, producing meteor trails and depositing metal atoms, ions, and meteoric smoke particles that influence the chemistry and dynamics of the mesosphere–lower thermosphere (MLT) region (80–105 km altitude). These meteoric inputs are linked to interesting phenomena, including noctilucent (polar mesospheric) clouds, polar mesospheric summer echoes (PMSE), and ozone perturbations.

In this work, we present volumetric reconstructions of meteor-trail emissions using a regularized, tomography-like inversion applied to multi-station optical observations. The method follows a parameterized forward-model framework previously developed for auroral tomography. The reconstructions are based on simultaneous observations from up to six stations of the ALIS-4D camera network, employing narrow-band filters centered at 427.8 nm, 557.7 nm, and 670.0 nm.

To our knowledge, this represents the first application of multi-filter optical tomography to meteoric trails. The resulting three-dimensional emission distributions provide new constraints for meteor ablation simulations and a quantitative reference for studies of excitation, transport, and trail evolution during meteoric events.