| To develop better understanding of the scattering mechanisms underlying microwave and millimeter wave (MMW) interaction with terrain, it is imperative to construct an extensive database of microwave and MMW measurements, and to develop analytical or empirical models to explain the observed features, with a fine balance between modeling rigorousness and flexibility as well as consistency.; This thesis contributes to both aspects through several specific contributions. In the case of database construction and enhancement, the contribution entailed a first-of kind extensive experimental characterization of MMW snow backscatter at grazing incidence, as well as the characterization of the forward scattered signal off of terrain surface at MMW.; The modeling contributions involved the development of analytical models for several important interactions of microwave and MMW with terrain. Specifically, first, the sensitivity to soil moisture for both active and passive sensors at, L band was evaluated, which showed that the radar and radiometric sensitivities exhibited comparable reductions due to vegetation cover, hence brought to a conclusion a long disputed issue. Second, this study showed that a simple first-order radiative transfer (RT) model, when coupled with high fidelity characterization of scattering parameters as functions of physical parameters, can capture the scattering mechanism for a complex setting such as a soybean-covered rough surface and provide very good prediction results. Third, we showed that mixed conventional RT (CRT) and dense media RT (DMRT) technique can be used to model the angular behavior of dry snow, provided that the disparity inherent in quasi-crystalline-approximation (QCA) for the extinction coefficient and in conventional determination of the phase matrix. To this purpose we proposed an albedo-matching technique and demonstrated its effectiveness. Forth, for MMW backscatter at wet snow, we showed that the underlying thermodynamic process needs to be fully appreciated and intelligently incorporated into model to provide good prediction performance. Fifth, we proposed a backscatter technique for MMW characterization of forward scattered signal off of terrain and showed its effectiveness when surface is smooth or slightly rough. For rough surface scattering, the conventional integral equation method (IEM) was extended to incorporate the antenna patterns in the theoretical formulation. |
