High fidelity propagation modelling in real time

The growing threat of low-flying cruise missiles, and the increased importance of littoral operations, have made real-time high fidelity radar propagation modeling essential to the Navy. Traditional propagation models used within the Navy community are valid only for standard atmosphere and homogeneous sea environments. Newly available propagation models-such as the parabolic equation based variety-which account for variable terrain and non-standard propagation conditions, are complex and too computationally intensive for real-time use. To overcome the computation hurdle, Technology Service Corporation has developed an interpolative scheme that runs an appropriate high fidelity model off-line, and compresses its output. The compressed data can then be stored in random access memory to support on-line real time interpolation. High fidelity has been achieved even in very complex, non-standard, littoral propagation scenarios. Throughput reduction was 5 million times, to a fraction of a millisecond per point on a 486/66 MHz PC. Storage compression was a factor of 10 to 50 times.