Application of physical optics to ocean surface radar scattering with CUDA

Abstract

The problem of electromagnetic waves scattering at rough boundaries is of practical interest and has been addressed many times in different papers. Theories for investigation of rough surface scattering primarily two kinds of methods: numerical method and approximate method. As the classic analytical methods cannot calculate the electromagnetic scattering characteristics at Low Grazing Angle (LGA) accurately, in this paper, a novel method is presented by utilizing the Radar Cross Section (RCS) of the low grazing two-dimensional sea surface based on the triangles-based Physical Optics (PO) method. Firstly, the Monte Carlo method is applied to simulate the two-dimension rough sea surface in different wind speeds based on the PM sea spectrum. Then, the sea surface is generally meshed by 1/8~1/10 length of the incident wave. Secondly, the complex permittivity of the sea surface is calculated by two-Debye method and compared with the experiment. The physical optical is used to calculate the backscattering coefficient of the random rough sea surface. Considering the problem of low grazing, it is especially sampled more densely between the scattering angles 70°~90°. Then the self-shadow and inter-shadow of the sea surface at low grazing angle is taken into account, the Z-BUFFER method is used to judgment of the shadow effect. The numerical result is compared with the FEKO and good agreement is obtained. As the frequency increasing, the sea surface will have more triangles to be calculated, it will take more time. Finally, we propose a novel graphic processing unit (GPU)-accelerated decoding system. The result is 68.96 faster than its CPU counterpart.