Formation of parallel meteor trail pairs as associated with their buoyant rise

In this paper we present numerical computations designed to demonstrate effects associated with the buoyant rise of the hot persistent meteor trails produced by large Leonid meteors. We show that, for a horizontally oriented cylinder of hot air, it is an inherent feature of the buoyant acceleration process that the rising cylinder divides into a pair of counter-rotating linear vortices. Computations are presented that were designed to model the conditions existing in two specific cases of large Leonid meteors for which we had photographs showing the evolution of the double trails. Some computed results are shown together with a photograph, and along with ancillary data on the amount of sodium in the trail and relative intensities of sodium emission and broadband visible and near-IR emission associated with the O2 “atmospheric” band.