Enabling Description of Tropospheric Wave Propagation With the Parabolic Equation Accumulated Split Error Correction Method

An increasingly popular approach of modeling electromagnetic wave propagation in the troposphere is to use the slip-step Fourier transform (SSFT) numerical algorithm to solve a parabolic equation (PE). However, available SSFT has yet to provide perfect solutions as incurring accumulated split error (ASE) in its step-by-step iteration process with a fixed propagation range step. To solve this problem, we propose an ASE correction method for PE, where the ASE is derived using the iteration idea of SSFT. On the basis of derivation results, the ASE is modeled based on propagation elevation angle distribution, which is estimated by ray tracing differential form. The performance of the PE ASE (PEASE) correction method is then demonstrated by several examples, where one example uses measured radar sea clutter data from Huanghai Sea, China. The results show that the PEASE correction method has better calculation accuracy. In addition, we provide some suggestions by analyzing the sensitivity of ASE resulting from various parameters in a standard and nonstandard atmosphere, respectively.