Numerical evaluation of radiowave propagation in evaporation ducts using FEM

Abstract

In this work, a finite element method (FEM) based solution of parabolic wave equation (PWE) is presented to model the radiowave propagation in evaporation duct. One dimensional piece-wise linear polynomial functions are used to discretize the height operator. By applying this discretization process, PWE reduces to an ordinary differential equation (ODE). Later, ODE is solved by Crank-Nicolson method and a marching algorithm like Split-step Fourier Transform method (SSFM) has been developed. Parametric refractivity M-profile model is used for the generation of vertical modified refractivity profile. To handle the atmosphere effects accurately, vertical refractivity profile has been assigned to every element. Finally, results are compared with SSFM for different environment conditions, which give a good justification. And results show that the proposed method can be an alternative to SSFM.