Comparison of a Simplified Version of TRACKER with an Analytic Solution to a Model Ray Tracing Problem

摘要

During the past two years LLNL has been developing a new, 3-D radio ray tracing code called TRACKER. Numerical results from TRACKER have been compared with those of the old 2-D code and a 3-D code written by Jones and Stephenson. A more ideal situation is to be able to compare numerical solutions with analytic solutions for certain model problems. Unfortunately, there is no known solution to a problem with the complicated ionospheric model and perturbation model present in TRACKER. However, in 1968 Croft and Hoogasian published a paper which contained an analytic solution to a radio ray tracing problem using a quasi-parabolic electron density model with no magnetic field or perturbation. A simplified version of TRACKER has been written to solve this problem numerically. Thus, we are not able to compare numerical solutions to analytic solutions for a restricted set of problems. The purpose of this report is to present the results of this comparison. As shown in Table 1, we have duplicated the analytic solutions to about six significant figures. In addition, the authors would like to comment on certain aspects of the numerical approximation which are of interest. (ERA citation 09:015219)