Numerical study of radio wave propagation in clear air acoustic scatterer

This paper numerically investigates the radio wave scattering by the artificial acoustic disturbance in the atmospheric boundary layer. The numerical model is based on the finitedifference time-domain（FDTD） method for radio wave propagation and fluid simulation for atmospheric disturbance by acoustics waves. The characteristics of radio wave scattering propagation in the artificial acoustic perturbations are investigated by this numerical model. The numerical simulation results demonstrate that the radio wave propagation scattered by acoustic scatterer has the characteristic of forward tropospheric scatter. When the radio waves are scattered, they distribute in all directions; a majority of radio waves continues to propagate along the original direction, and only a small part of the energy is scattered. For the same acoustic scatterer, if we merely change the radio wave emission elevation, the horizontal spans of forward scattering radio wave packets centers gradually decrease with the increasing of emission elevations; and the energy of wave packets increases firstly and then decreases with launching elevation, reaching the maximum at a certain angle. If we merely change the wave emitting position, the horizontal spans decrease with the increasing of emission positions, and the energy of wave packets also increases firstly and then decreases with launch position, reaching the maximum at a certain position. This approach can be very promising for atmospheric scatter communications.