Performance of D-criteria in isolating meteor showers from the sporadic background in an optical data set

TL;DR

This paper introduces a method to determine optimal orbital similarity cutoff values for isolating meteor showers from sporadic background, improving the accuracy of shower identification in optical meteor data.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel approach to set per-shower cutoff values based on acceptable false-positive rates, enhancing the reliability of meteor shower detection.

Findings

Method effectively distinguishes significant showers from background.

Application to NASA meteor data demonstrates improved shower identification.

Cutoff values tailored to each shower reduce false positives.

Abstract

Separating meteor showers from the sporadic meteor background is critical for the study of both showers and the sporadic complex. The linkage of meteors to meteor showers, to parent bodies, and to other meteors is done using measures of orbital similarity. These measures often take the form of so-called D-parameters and are generally paired with some cutoff value within which two orbits are considered related. The appropriate cutoff value can depend on the size of the data-set (Southworth & Hawkins 1963), the sporadic contribution within the observed size range (Jopek 1995), or the inclination of the shower (Galligan 2001). If the goal is to minimize sporadic contamination of the extracted shower, the cutoff value should also reflect the strength of the shower compared to the local sporadic background. In this paper, we present a method for determining, on a per-shower basis, the orbital similarity cutoff value that corresponds to a chosen acceptable false-positive rate. This method also assists us in distinguishing which showers are significant within a set of data. We apply these methods to optical meteor observations from the NASA All-Sky and Southern Ontario Meteor Networks.