Global Point-to-Point Ionospheric Ray Tracing Using the Direct Variational Method

Abstract

Global optimization of phase distance functional is a promising approach to the multipath problem of the point-to-point ionospheric ray tracing. The approach is involves systematic algorithm where all relevant rays between the fixed points are found one after another in a systematic manner, without the need to provide an accurate initial estimation for each solution. In particular for each 10-cal ray searching the direct variational method is applied. The global optimization is applied to a point-to-point ionospheric ray tracing, where the modeled ionosphere is three-dimensional inhomogeneous medium.