Airborne measurements of anomalous propagation over the English Channel

In order to gain some insight on the refractivity structures that lead to superrefraction and ducting in Western Europe, a campaign of airborne measurements over the English Channel was undertaken in collaboration with the Meteorological Research Flight. The flights took place on a path from Bournemouth to Lannion, in order to take advantage of the additional data supplied by the COST 210 X-band link between these locations. Six successful missions were carried out between June and September 1989. The paper briefly describes the experimental set-up and the analysis procedure, before giving examples of observed meteorological structures. As well as a source of interesting 2-dimensional meteorological data, the RAL/MRF ducting campaign provided an opportunity to compare measured RF data, with predictions of field-strength using the parabolic equation method. These comparisons are also discussed