Fully Coherent Electromagnetic Scattering Computation for Snowpacks Based on Statistical S-Matrix Approach

Abstract

Electromagnetic scattering model from 3-D snowpack with arbitrary thickness is considered. A fully coherent model is presented through the usage of the Statistical S-Matrix Wave Propagation in Spectral Domain approach (SSWaP-SD). The computer-generated snow media is constructed using 3-D spatial exponential correlation function along with Lineal-Path function to preserve the connectivity of the snow particles as well. The SSWaP-SD in conjunction with a Method of Moments (MoM) code based on the discrete-dipole approximation (DDA) is chosen to leverage both the time-efficient computations of the DDA and the full-coherency of the SSWaP-SD method simultaneously. The SSWaP-SD depends on the discretization of the medium into thin slabs. Several realizations of a thin snow slab are solved numerically to form the statistics of the scattering matrix representing such a thin snow layer. For an arbitrarily thick snow layer, thin slabs of a snowpack are analyzed and a corresponding polarimetric N-port (representing different directions of scattering) S-matrix is generated. These S-matrices are cascaded using SSWaP-SD method to calculate the total forward and backward bistatic scattered fields in a fully coherent way. The simulation results of the backscattering from an arbitrary thick snow layer are presented and validated with measurements.