Poster · Asteroids, Comets, Meteors 2026 · Poznań, Poland

Finding meteorites in weather radar

MetDetect: automatically detecting freshly fallen meteorites in the U.S. NEXRAD Doppler weather-radar network.

When a fireball drops meteorites, the surviving stones fall through the atmosphere as a dispersed cloud of debris. As they pass through the beam of a nearby weather radar they briefly light up the lowest scan elevations, a faint, falling signature buried in the same data meteorologists use to track storms.

The U.S. NEXRAD network archives every sweep from 150+ radars, going back decades. Searching it by hand is how several meteorite falls have already been recovered, but it's slow and easy to miss. MetDetect automates that search: a machine-learning pipeline that scans the archive around candidate fall times and flags the radar signature of falling meteorites, so we can point recovery teams to a fall while the meteorites are still fresh.

How it works

Step 1

Pull archived NEXRAD Level-II sweeps around a candidate fall's time and location.

Step 2

Isolate low-altitude reflectivity gates consistent with falling debris, rejecting weather and clutter.

Step 3

Score and cluster the surviving gates to localize the fall and estimate a search footprint.

Step 4

Flag the strongest candidates for human review and field recovery.

Detection results

updated

Result figures are being curated. Detection results will appear here shortly, check back during the poster session.

Thanks for scanning! This page is updated live through the conference. The full write-up is in Shober, Fries & Abell, “MetDetect” (in prep., Meteoritics & Planetary Science). Questions or collaboration: [email protected].