Tropospheric radiowave propagation

Abstract

One of the main applications of parabolic equation techniques is the calculation of radio coverage in the troposphere. Specific approximations need to be made in order to derive an appropriate scalar parabolic equation for tropospheric radiowave propagation from Maxwell's equations. This give a very brief overview of the basic notions of radio-meteorology in Section 4.2. Scalar wave equations for horizontally and vertically polarized radiowaves are derived in Section 4.3. The next stage is to choose a coordinate system which simplifies the representation of structures following the Earth's surface. This is the purpose of the Earth flattening transformation, which is derived in Section 4.4. This have now reduced several types of radiowave propagation problems to the two-dimensional scalar wave equation. The various frameworks are summarized in Section 4.5. Go back to tropospheric propagation in Section 4.6, where we set up the parabolic equations for tropospheric propagation of horizontally and vertically polarized radiowaves. Finally, we considered normalization of the output PE field in Section 4.7, relating the initial field to the far-field beam pattern.