Application of iterative moment-method solutions to ocean surface radar scattering

Abstract

Numerical methods such as the banded matrix iterative approach (BMIA) represent a major advance in the direct numerical simulation of rough surface-wave scattering. This paper considers the application of iterative methods such as the BMIA to ocean-radar scattering. It is shown that for typical microwave radar frequencies and sea-surface roughness, the BMIA is actually of limited use. A more general iterative solution based on a multigrid decomposition and the generalized conjugate residual (GCR) method, is thus developed. The multigrid approach is ideally suited to the broad-band ocean surface, as it solves the scattering problem on a sequence of grids, each corresponding to a different range of spatial frequencies or length scales. This approach is applied here to several sea scattering problems, including very low grazing angles and both horizontal and vertical polarization. Good agreement is obtained with perturbation theory in the appropriate limits and several qualitative characteristics of radar backscatter data are reproduced.