<title>Electromagnetic modeling of foliage-obscured point source response</title>

Abstract

This paper investigates the attenuation and phase fluctuations of electromagnetic waves propagating through foliage. These fluctuations are important in determining how well an object obscured by foliage can be imaged with synthetic aperture radar. A theoretical model is developed to calculate the mean attenuation and the amplitude and phase fluctuations. The attenuation of average received field is obtained from the sum of absorption loss and scattering loss. The amplitude fluctuation of electromagnetic wave is calculated from the bistatic scattering coefficients using the radiative transfer theory. The phase fluctuation is obtained from the amplitude fluctuation assuming the phase of the fluctuation field is uniformly distributed from -(pi) to (pi) . The average received power is obtained from the sum of the power of average field and the power of fluctuation field. The attenuation is then obtained by comparing the radiated power from a source under foliage to the received power from a source in free space. Theoretical results are compared with experimental data collected by MIT Lincoln Laboratory during the 1990 Foliage Penetration Experiment. This theoretical model is also used to illustrate the polarization and angular dependencies of attenuation and phase fluctuations.