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A spectacular, well-observed Leonid meteor of visual magnitude -14.3 appeared on 17 November 1998 and left a lingering trail, dubbed the Glowworm, that was well studied. From a location on Kirtland Air Force Base, near Albuquerque, New Mexico, we obtained CCD images of the trail from 94 to 203 s after the meteor and recorded a video with an intensified camera for even longer. From information obtained with a sodium lidar half an hour after the meteor, we have determined that a gravity wave with a vertical wavelength of 2.4 km was responsible for the right-angled appearance of the trail. The trail ended abruptly at 85 km, and its uppermost altitude may have been no greater than 91 km. We designate the Glowworm a Type I trail: one that is wide (1 km), cloudy in appearance, has high diffusion rates (800m2 s-1), high total line emission rates (1.5 x 1018 photons m-1 s-1), and is optically thicker than Type II trails. The lower parts of the Diamond Ring, another Leonid lingering trail that appeared 38 min earlier than the Glowworm, define the Type II trails, which appear as narrow, optically thinner parallel trails, with low diffusion rates (12 m2 s-1) and total line emission rates (1–3 x 1016 photons m1 s-1). No explanation is offered for the two orders of magnitude difference in these quantities. The Glowworm meteor produced infrasound [ReVelle and Whitaker, 1999], from which a meteoroid mass estimate of 522 g was made. We compare our photometry to a detailed numerical modeling of the shape of the trail and emission from the Glowworm made by Zinn et al. [1999], who find that the largest contributors to emission recorded by our CCD and video cameras are atmospheric O2 vibrational bands. Compared to our measurements, their calculated emission is too high by two orders of magnitude, but since most of O2 emission may be absorbed by atmospheric O2 before it reaches the ground, this may indeed be the primary contributor to the observed flux. Although the calculations of Zinn

From a single image of a persistent trail left by a -1.5 magnitude Leonid meteor on November 17, 1998, the relative winds between 92.5 and 98 km altitude are derived, where the altitudes are determined by a sodium lidar. These are converted to true winds 82 sec after the appearance of the meteor by fixing the winds at 98 km to match the results of following the trail with the lidar for twelve minutes. The image and winds reveal a fine example of the effects of a gravity wave having a vertical wavelenth of 5.50 ± 0.02 km, a horizontal wavelength of 2650 ± 60 kin, an intrinsic period of 19.5 ± 0.4 hours, and an observed period of 8.6 ± 0.1 hours. Effects of the gravity wave are still present in the wind field 70 rain later.

Sodium resonance lidar observations of meteor trails are reported from the 1998 Leonid shower experimental at the Starfire Optical Range Kirtland Air Force Base, NM (35.0º N, 106.5º W ). The lidar was operating in a spatially scanning mode that allowed tracking for up to one half-hour. Three trails are presented here whose motion allowed inference of radial as well as vector wind components and apparent diffusivities. The winds are derived independently using the narrow linewidth sodium (Na) resonance Doppler lidar technique and are compared with the tracking results.