Tropospheric Duct Presence and their Effects on Communications Signals in Abidjan, Douala and Libreville

Abstract

Duct layers are found to be common occurrence in coastal areas
of the world where their behavior is stochastic in nature and
infringes on wireless radio communication. In this work, Advance
Refractive Effects Prediction System (AREPS) was used to predict
the presence of duct phenomena in the Abidjan, Douala and
Libreville regions. AREPS was used to compute and display
decision profiles with radiosonde data from Abidjan, Douala and
Libreville. Results show that Abidjan’s troposphere exhibited more
presence of surface duct with 85.2% occurrences and Douala
troposphere exhibited more presence of surface-based duct with
45.6% occurrences. Libreville with elevated duct has 48.2%
occurrences. With specific focus on Abidjan, the scenario shows
that the propagation loss increases with range but with steady
decay throughout the range signifying that the communication
signal extended beyond the target. The outcome of this study is
expected to provide the regional understanding of tropospheric
ducts presence and their pattern for the design and deployment of
communication networks