A Radar Signature Model for Partially Coherent Scattering from Irregular Surfaces

The radar signature of irregular surfaces, relevant to remote sensing of the earth, represents the characterstics of the electromagnetic field components associated with monostatic radar backsattering. These characteristics are expressable in terms of amplitude, polarization, phase and time dependen...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE transactions on geoscience and remote sensing 1982-01, Vol.GE-20 (1), p.76-84
Main Authors: Attema, E. P. W., Van Kats, P. J., Krul, L.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Earth
Electromagnetic fields
Electromagnetic scattering
Electromagnetic wave polarization
Radar cross section
Radar remote sensing
Radar scattering
Radar theory
Remote sensing
Sea surface
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Summary:The radar signature of irregular surfaces, relevant to remote sensing of the earth, represents the characterstics of the electromagnetic field components associated with monostatic radar backsattering. These characteristics are expressable in terms of amplitude, polarization, phase and time dependence. The irregular nature of the objects of interest caues the scattered field components to be random functions. The majority of experimental and theoretical studies of radar signatures deal therefore with the estimated ensenble average of the scattered power rather than the actual electromagnetic field components, the average power being expressed by the radar cross section per unit area. Normalizing the radar cross section with respect to unit area elements implicitly asumes that the average backscattered power from individual surface elements adds incoherently. The use of the radar cross section per unit area concept is therefore limited to those caes where it is ascertained that the uminated area is much larger than the width of the spatial autocorrelation function of the random surfaces involved. However, with present day high resdution radars for monitoring land and sea as well as with short range scatterometry this requirement will not aways be satisfied. Therefore, partial coherence needs to be considered for these caes. In the present paper an electromagnetic scattering model is presented in which spatial correlation beyond the contour of the iluminated area is taken into account. Specifically, two scale surface roughness is considered in which small scale imregulaities are riding on gentle undulations.
ISSN:0196-2892
1558-0644
DOI:10.1109/TGRS.1982.4307524