Remote sensing of atmospheric duct parameters using simulated annealing

Simulated annealing is one of the robust optimization schemes. Simulated annealing mimics the annealing process of the slow cooling of a heated metal to reach a stable minimum energy state. In this paper, we adopt simulated annealing to study the problem of the remote sensing of atmospheric duct parameters for two different geometries of propagation measurement. One is from a single emitter to an array of radio receivers (vertical measurements), and the other is from the radar clutter returns (horizontal measurements). Basic principles of simulated annealing and its applications to refractivity estimation are introduced. The performance of this method is validated using numerical experiments and field measurements collected at the East China Sea. The retrieved results demonstrate the feasibility of simulated annealing for near real-time atmospheric refractivity estimation. For comparison, the retrievals of the genetic algorithm are also presented. The comparisons indicate that the convergence speed of simulated annealing is faster than that of the genetic algorithm, while the anti-noise ability of the genetic algorithm is better than that of simulated annealing.