Modeling Ground-Wave Propagation Across Sea Ice for Radio Navigation Applications

Abstract. The ground-wave signals of terrestrial radio navigation systems, which operate in the medium and low frequency band, are sensitive to changes in the electrical parameters of the Earth's surface between the transmitter and receiver. Sea ice affects the electrical parameters of the sea and leads to an additional signal phase delay compared to the propagation over salt water. To ensure the uniform performance of the navigation receivers for these systems throughout the year, the impact of sea ice on the signal has to be known. A challenge here is the high spatial and temporal dynamic of sea ice in some regions. Earth observation data can be used to obtain information regarding the world-wide sea-ice coverage and further electrical ground parameters. In this paper, our proposed model for the ground-wave propagation and Copernicus data are used to compute the impact of varying conditions on the signal propagation. Simulation results for a real-world scenario show that the signal propagation delay caused by sea ice can lie in the order of 20 ns with respect to sea water.