Microwave Remote Sensing of Natural Stratification

摘要

The response of natural stratification to electromagnetic wave has received much attention in last decades, due to its crucial role played in the remote sensing arena. In this context, when the superficial structure of the Earth, whose formation is inherently layered, is concerned, the most general scheme that can be adopted includes the characterization of layered random media. Moreover, a key issue in remote sensing of Earth and other Planets is to reveal the content under the surface illuminated by the sensors. For such a purpose, a quantitative mathematical analysis of wave propagation in three-dimensional layered rough media is fundamental in understanding intriguing scattering phenomena in such structures, especially in the perspective of remote sensing applications. Recently, a systematic formulation has been introduced to deal with the analysis of a layered structure with an arbitrary number of rough interfaces. Specifically, the results of the Boundary Perturbation Theory (BPT) lead to polarimetric, formally symmetric and physical revealing closed form analytical solutions. The comprehensive scattering model based on the BPT methodologically permits to analyze the bi-static scattering patterns of 3D multilayered rough media. The aim of this paper is to systematically show how polarimetric models obtainable in powerful BPT framework can be successfully applied to several situations of interest, emphasizing its wide relevance in the remote sensing applications scenario. In particular, a proper characterization of the relevant interfacial roughness is adopted resorting to the fractal geometry; numerical examples are then presented with reference to representative of several situations of interest.