2-D local ionosphere propagation model using an implicit ADE FDTD method combined with a layer smoothing technique

The propagation of a sinusoidal wave is simulated in a simplified model of two-dimensional (2-D) local ionosphere using a novel implicit auxiliary differential equation (ADE) finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method combined with a layer smoothing (LS) technique. Impacts of both the diurnal variation and the natural geomagnetic field on the ionosphere model are taken into account. It is found that this implicit FDTD method has the same stability condition as that in the free space regardless of the plasma parameters, which is flexible in a wide variety of plasma simulation applications.