A Local Parabolic Method for Long Distance Wave Propagation

Abstract

A pulse propagation method for tracing the path of a short wavelength signal through a medium with varying index of refraction and over complex, reflecting terrain has been developed. The method is completely Eulerian and does not use any markers that can become sparse as the signal spreads in the lateral direction. On the other hand, unlike conventional Eulerian wave equation methods, the signal does not suffer degradation due to numerical error such as diffusion, even though the wavelength is of the order of a grid cell and the signal can propagate over arbitrarily long distances. During the contract period, it has been demonstrated, both theoretically and numerically, that there are no interaction effects when signals pass through each other, even after a large number of interactions. This is true of the actual linear wave equation that is being simulated, but had to be shown for our numerical method, which has a strong nonlinear component.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Sep 21, 2005
Accession Number
ADA439389

Entities

People

  • Jon Steinhoff
  • Lesong Wang

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Air Platforms
  • Energy and Power Technologies
  • Weapons Technologies

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Cell Size
  • Computational Fluid Dynamics
  • Computational Science
  • Computations
  • Computers
  • Contracts
  • Difference Equations
  • Differential Equations
  • Diffusion
  • Equations
  • Numerical Analysis
  • Partial Differential Equations
  • Refractive Index
  • Three Dimensional
  • Two Dimensional
  • Wave Equations
  • Wave Propagation

Readers

  • Atmospheric Science / Meteorology, specifically Wind Wave Turbulence.
  • Finite Element Method (FEM) for solving Partial Differential Equations (PDEs)
  • Radar Systems Engineering.