Model study of the effect of the main ionospheric trough on oblique HF radiowave propagation

The purpose of this paper is to study the effect of the main ionospheric trough location on the form of oblique sounding ionograms on the Murmansk-St. Petersburg subauroral radio path. Using a mathematical model of the high-latitude ionosphere, we have calculated four different distributions of electron density along the radio path. One of the distributions has been obtained when the trough is absent, and the remaining three distributions contain troughs of approximately identical depth and width but located at different distances from the ends of the radio path. Using the program of two-dimensional ray tracing, we numerically synthesized oblique-incidence ionograms for each of the four obtained distributions of electron density. The calculations have shown that the location of the main ionospheric trough affects considerably the shape of oblique-incidence ionograms.