Adaptive filtering for the separation of incoherent scatter and meteor signals for Arecibo observation data

The Arecibo 430 MHz incoherent scatter radar (ISR) has been used to observe the ionosphere and meteors over 40 years. The meteor signals have traditionally been treated as the interference in ionosphere observation data, while more recently the incoherent scatter signals have been described as background noise in the meteor observation data. In this paper we present signal processing techniques that separate these two different signals into different geophysically interesting data sets. We investigate two techniques for two different data sets. For meteor observation data an adaptive filter is used to locate and separate meteor returns from the total data so that we improve meteor detection rate. For ionosphere observation data we use a filterbank followed by the short time Fourier transform (STFT) analysis to remove the meteor signals from the incoherent scatter results. By doing this the incoherent scatter data will not be contaminated and we can also analyze meteor characteristics from the separated signal.