Abstract
Electromagnetic (EM) waves are one of the important carriers for information exchange in seawater. The EM parameters of seawater are important factors that affect the performance of EM wave propagation. In the real marine environment, non-constant EM parameters make it impossible to consider seawater as a homogeneous media in the model. However, there are few targeted analyses in the existing studies. In this paper, an N-layered media model was established to investigate the influence of non-constant EM parameters on EM wave propagation in seawater. A direct global matrix method is proposed to solve the EM fields, whose result accuracy does not decrease with the increasing number of layers. The necessity and correctness of the model and methods are verified through numerical simulations and sea experiments. Combined with the existing marine environment database, the propagation characteristics of EM waves in different EM parameter profiles of seawater were analyzed through numerical experiments. The results indicated that the non-homogeneous seawater has a great impact on the intensity, phase, change rate, and spatial distribution of EM waves. Furthermore, the influence is not only reflected in the underwater EM field but also in the air and increases with frequency.