Doppler spectrum of polarimetric scattering field from two-dimensional time-varying nonlinear sea surfaces

Abstract

Polarimetric scattering model of second-order small-slope approxi-mation combined with “choppy wave" model (CWM) for describing nonlinear hydrodynamic interactions between ocean waves is utilized in this paper to investigate the influence of sea surface nonlinearities on backscattering coefficient as well as Doppler spectrum signatures including Doppler shift and spectral bandwidth. Simulation results show that at moderate to large incidence angles the Doppler shift and spectral bandwidth of the CWM nonlinear sea surfaces are significantly larger than those of linear sea surfaces, in particular at low grazing angles. In addition, Doppler signatures show distinct polarization dependence, and most importantly the cross-polarized Doppler signatures significantly differ from the co-polarized ones. It is also indicated that co-polarized Doppler shift increases obviously with wind speed increasing, whereas the cross-polarized Doppler shift looks less sensitive to wind speed variations. The difference of Doppler signatures between co- and cross-polarization is potentially valuable for ocean remote sensing applications, especially for observing very high winds.