Electromagnetic propagation in conducting shallow water

The growing interest for non-acoustic means of transmission in sea water leads to theoretical studies dealing with the propagation of radio waves in a conducting and stratified space. The paper presents a new approach of the radiation of a horizontal electric dipole in shallow water; with the hypothesis of a low conducting sea bottom and for a large horizontal range between the source and the receiver, surface waves remain the only significant contribution to the radiation of the dipole. Their behaviour in sea water is studied and the representation which is used provides analytic formulae of the resulting electric field. The computation of these relations and the various tests made on this occasion show the enhancement of the electromagnetic waves due to the stratification in the far range