Controlled time integration for the numerical simulation of meteor radar reflections

- Three-dimensional meteor plasma dynamics is considered by numerical simulations.
- Discrete exterior calculus improves the efficiency of explicit time-stepping.
- Controlled time integration accelerates the convergence to time-harmonic solution.

We model meteoroids entering the Earth׳s atmosphere as objects surrounded by non-magnetized plasma, and consider efficient numerical simulation of radar reflections from meteors in the time domain. Instead of the widely used finite difference time domain method (FDTD), we use more generalized finite differences by applying the discrete exterior calculus (DEC) and non-uniform leapfrog-style time discretization. The computational domain is presented by convex polyhedral elements. The convergence of the time integration is accelerated by the exact controllability method. The numerical experiments show that our code is efficiently parallelized. The DEC approach is compared to the volume integral equation (VIE) method by numerical experiments. The result is that both methods are competitive in modelling non-magnetized plasma scattering. For demonstrating the simulation capabilities of the DEC approach, we present numerical experiments of radar reflections and vary parameters in a wide range.