Latitudinal Variation of Bolide Flux as Detected by GOES GLM

The large combined field of view of the Geostationary Lightning Mapper (GLM) instruments aboard the GOES satellites makes them useful for studying bolides (i.e. bright meteors). The thousands of GLM bolide detections allow us to empirically investigate the latitudinal variation of bolide flux. We discretize the data using a novel randomized method and develop a Bayesian Poisson regression model which simultaneously estimates GLM bolide detection biases and the latitudinal flux variation. The estimated bias due to the angle of incident light upon the instrument corresponds roughly with the previously measured sensitivity of the GLM instruments. Using posterior distributions from the larger model, we also apply a smaller Poisson regression model to subsets of the data representing meteor showers that GLM is sensitive to. We compare our latitudinal flux variation estimates—for the total set of data, and for particular meteor showers—to existing theoretical models and discuss how much a bias due to bolide impact velocities may affect estimates derived from GLM data.