On radio-wave propagation in forest environments

Abstract

Propagation of electromagnetic waves in forest environments at medium and high (1-100 MHz) frequencies is examined for the case where both the transmitting and receiving points are situated within the vegetation. A dissipative slab in the presence of a reflecting ionosphere is employed to describe the forest configuration. If the effect of the ground-forest interface is disregarded, the radiated field of an arbitrarily oriented, small dipole is found to consist primarily of two separate waves: a lateral wave which skims along the tree tops, and a sky wave which is produced by a single-hop reflection at the ionospheric layer. These two field constituents are compared and their domains of preponderance are calculated for a large range of the pertinent parameters; it is then found that the lateral wave plays the major role since the sky wave is restricted to a narrow frequency band and its amplitude is appreciable only at large distances. The lateral-wave field is examined in detail and is shown to yield a simple physical picture for the propagation mechanism in forests. Its features are found to be qualitatively consistent with the field behavior reported in the literature and the quantitative aspects agree well with the available experimental data. The observed variation of the field with distance, the height-gain effect, the vegetation factor, the basic path loss, and depolarization effects are separately examined and are all shown to express merely one or another of the intrinsic properties of a lateral wave. The ground-proximity effect produced by the presence of a planar-conducting ground is also estimated and shown to be of minor importance in most cases.