An Improved Accuracy Split-Step Pade Parabolic Equation for Tropospheric Radio-Wave Propagation

This paper is devoted to modeling the tropospheric electromagnetic waves propagation over irregular terrain by the higher-order finite-difference methods for the parabolic equation (PE). The proposed approach is based on the Pade rational approximations of the propagation operator, which is applied simultaneously along with longitudinal and transversal coordinates. At the same time, it is still possible to model the inhomogeneous tropospheric refractive index. Discrete dispersion analysis of the proposed scheme is carried out. A comparison with the other finite-difference methods for solving the parabolic equation and the split-step Fourier (SSF) method is given. It is shown that the proposed method allows using a more sparse computational grid than the existing finite-difference methods. This in turn results in more fast computations.