Application of a Self-Organizing State Space Model to the Leonid Meteor Storm in 2001

Abstract: The Leonids show meteor storms in a period of 33 years, and known as one of the most active meteor showers. It has recently shown a meteor stream consisting of several narrow dust trails made by meteoroids ejected from a parent comet. Hence, an analysis of the temporal behavior of the meteor flux is important to study the structure of the trails. However, statistical inference for the count data is not an easy task, because of its Poisson characteristics. We carried out a wide-field video observation of the Leonid meteor storm in 2001. We formulated a state-of-the-art statistical analysis, which is called a self-organizing state space model, to infer the true behavior of the dust density of the trails properly from the meteor count data. {}From this analysis, we found that the trails have a fairly smooth spatial structure, with small and dense clumps that cause a temporal burst of meteor flux. We also proved that the time behavior (trend) of the fluxes of bright meteors and that of faint meteors are significantly different. In addition we comment on some other application of the self-organizing state-space model in fields related to astronomy and astrophysics.