Statistical temporal behaviour of pulse wave propagation through continuous random media

Pulse waves propagating through random media suffer distortions, such as fluctuation of arrival time, temporal broadening, and alteration of skewness and kurtosis, due to both the background medium and embedded irregularities. We carry out a study on the temporal behaviour of electromagnetic pulses propagating through random media using temporal moments and an analytic solution of a two-frequency mutual coherence function recently obtained by iteration. We treat the temporal characteristics sequentially, with general expressions obtained first. Then the concise forms are given for pulse propagation in the turbulent non-dispersive atmosphere and the ionosphere, with numerical calculations for the latter. The results show that the mean arrival time is dominated by the term propagating at group velocity, and small corrections arise from higher-order dispersion of the background medium and random scattering of irregularities, but the correction from dispersion of irregularities is neglected as it is so small. As for pulse broadening in trans-ionospheric propagation, the results show that contributions are mainly from the dispersion of the background ionosphere and scattering of electron density irregularities in most cases, and the contribution of dispersion of irregularities is so small that it can be neglected. Finally, we find that the temporal skewness of a trans-ionospheric pulse is negative and its energy is shifted to the leading edge, and the contributions from scattering and dispersion of irregularities dominate over those of background, so the latter can be neglected in most cases.