ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Mar. Sci.
Sec. Ocean Observation
Volume 12 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fmars.2025.1615118
This article is part of the Research TopicMaritime Complex Environment and Wireless CommunicationView all articles
Spatial and Temporal Distributions of Evaporation Ducts in the Black Sea and Their Impact on the Over-the-Horizon Propagation of Electromagnetic Waves
Provisionally accepted
- 1Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi'an, China
- 2Harbin Engineering University, Harbin, Heilongjiang Province, China
- 3School of Electronic Information and Electrical Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China
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The evaporation duct is a critical factor in maritime electromagnetic wave propagation. It exhibits significant spatiotemporal variability influenced by regional meteorological dynamics. While existing studies have explored evaporation ducts in various regions, the Black Sea is a strategic maritime zone with complex land-sea interactions and remains underexamined. This study presents a integration of the ERA5 reanalysis dataset, the Navy Atmospheric Vertical Surface Layer Model (NAVSLaM), and the Advanced Propagation Model (APM) to systematically characterize evaporation duct height (EDH) distributions in the Black Sea and quantify their impact on over-the-horizon propagation. Leveraging the ERA5 reanalysis dataset for the whole year of 2022, we reveal pronounced north-south EDH gradients: northern regions exhibit seasonal peaks in spring and summer (mean EDH 14.51 m, exceeding annual averages by 2.69 m) driven by lower relative humidity (67.68\%), while southern regions show muted seasonality due to higher humidity (72.57\%). This study demonstrates that varying evaporation duct conditions induce path loss fluctuations exceeding 100 dB, critically altering radar detection ranges. These findings provide the first comprehensive EDH climatology for the Black Sea and establish actionable insights for optimizing maritime communication and radar systems in evaporation duct-prone environments.
Keywords: Evaporation ducts, Maritime channel modeling, Black Sea, electromagnetic wave propagation, NAVSLaM Model, APM Model
Received: 20 Apr 2025; Accepted: 22 May 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Feng, Wang, Huang, Yang, Shu and Yang. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Chunlong Huang, Harbin Engineering University, Harbin, 150001, Heilongjiang Province, China
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