Study of scattering from time-varying Gerstners sea surface using second-order small slope approximation

Abstract

Backscattered fields from one-dimensional time-varying Gerstners sea surface are calculated utilising the second-order small slope approximation. It is well known that spectral properties of the backscattered echoes relate to the velocity of the small elementary scatterers on sea surface profiles. Therefore, modeling Doppler spectra from the ocean requires an accurate description of the sea surface motion. The profile of nonlinear Gerstners sea surface shows vertical-skewness of sea waves, it is sharper at the crest and flatter at the trough than linear waves, and its maximum slope position is closer to the crest than to the trough. Furthermore, the horizontal component of the small elementary scatterers orbit velocity on the sea surface, which yields noticeable influence on Doppler spectra, can be obtained conveniently by Gerstners sea surface model. In this study, the characteristics of Doppler spectra of backscattered fields from time-varying Gerstners sea surface are investigated and the dependences of the Doppler frequency and the Doppler bandwidth on the parameters, such as the wind speed, the radar frequency, the incident angle, etc. are discussed. It is shown that the Doppler bandwidth of microwave scattered fields from Gerstners sea surface is considerably broadened. For the case of high frequency backscattered fields, the values of the higher-order spectrum peaks are larger than those obtained by linear sea surface.