Radio wave by radio receivers, using antennas. Radio waves are very widely used in modern technology for fixed and mobile radio communication, broadcasting, radar and other navigation systems, communications satellites, wireless computer networks and many other applications. Different frequencies of radio waves have different propagation characteristics in the Earth's atmosphere; long waves can diffract around obstacles like mountains and follow the contour of the earth (ground waves), shorter waves can reflect off the ionosphere and return to earth beyond the horizon (skywaves), while much shorter wavelengths bend or diffract very little and travel on a line of sight, so their propagation distances
Atmospheric wave scale Rossby waves gives rise to sudden stratospheric warmings and the deposition by gravity waves gives rise to the quasi-biennial oscillation. In the mathematical description of atmospheric waves, spherical harmonics are used. When considering a section of a wave along a latitude circle, this is equivalent to a sinusoidal shape. Because the propagation of the wave is fundamentally caused by an imbalance of the forces acting on the air (which is often thought of in terms of air parcels when considering wave motion), the types of waves and their propagation characteristics vary latitudinally, principally because the Coriolis effect on horizontal