Weather radar
Weather radar can detect falling meteorites in dark flight, helping searchers find where they landed.
Weather radars send out radio pulses and detect echoes from raindrops, hail and snow. They can also pick up falling meteorites, because larger fragments and clouds of small debris reflect the pulses during dark flight, after the fireball has ended.
The first meteorite recovered using weather radar data was from a fall in Wisconsin in 2010. Since then, radar has helped locate many falls in the United States and elsewhere, including Sutter's Mill in California in 2012 and others. Radar signatures appear at heights of a few kilometres, a minute or so after the fireball, showing exactly where material was falling.
Combined with fireball trajectory and wind data, radar returns narrow the search area dramatically. This is especially useful in places without dense camera networks. Scientists check radar archives after every reported bright fireball to see whether falling meteorites were captured.
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