Assessment of evaporation duct propagation simulation

The evaporation duct strongly influence microwave radars and communication systems. For evaluation of their performance in such environment combination of split-step parabolic equation and Monin-Obukhov similarity theory are usual approach. There are several variants of semiempirical functions used in the similarity theory which leads to different models for evaporation duct height estimation. Five models were analyzed in this paper and evaporation duct height derived from them were compared with ”effective” duct height obtained minimizing the difference between measured propagation factor and split-step parabolic equation calculation for varying evaporation duct height by least-square method. The best result in average was showed by ECMWF model and for other models ”effective” evaporation duct heights was lower then obtained from bulk measurements. It means that combination of these models and split-step parabolic equation method leads to overestimation of propagation factor values.