An empirical bispectrum model for sea surface scattering

Abstract

The properties of a surface bispectrum are found by generating a skewed surface on a digital computer and then evaluating its correlation function, bicoherence function, power spectrum, and bispectrum. The bispectrum is defined to be the Fourier transform of the bicoherence function. It is found that the surface bicoherence function and its first and second derivatives must all vanish at the origin. In general, the surface bispectrum is a complex function. Its real part is centrosymmetric, just like the surface spectrum, and its imaginary part is antisymmetric. A function with the above-stated properties is introduced to represent the imaginary part of the sea surface bispectrum. The unknown parameter in this function is calibrated using a data set from the FASINEX experiment. The sea surface backscattering model is based on an integral equation model which accounts for frequency, polarization, incident angle, azimuthal angle, and wind speed. It is found that the proposed bispectrum can be used to account for the up/down wind asymmetry. >