| The need to understand the interaction of microwaves with vegetation canopies has markedly increased in recent years. This is due to advances made in remote sensing science, microwave technology, and signal processing circuits. One class of the earth's vegetation cover is man-made canopies, such as agricultural fields, orchards, and artificial forests. Contrary to natural vegetation terrain, location, spacing, and density of plants in a man-made vegetation canopy are deterministic quantities. As a result, the semi-deterministic nature of cultural vegetation canopies violate the random assumption of the radiative transfer theory and leads to experimented results that are in variance with model calculations. Hence, an alternative approach is needed to model the interaction of microwaves with such canopies.;This thesis examines the propagation behavior through a canopy of corn plants. The corn canopy was selected as a representative of cultural vegetation canopies that are planted in parallel rows with an approximately fixed spacing between adjacent plants. Several experimental measurements were conducted to determine the transmission properties of a corn canopy in the 1-10 GHz range. The measurements which included horizontal propagation through the canopy as well as propagation at oblique incidence, were performed for defoliated canopies and for canopies with leaves.;Through experimental observations and model development, the propagation behavior was found to be strongly dependent on the wavelength and the path length. At a wavelength in the neighborhood of 20 cm, for example, it was found that scattering by the stalks was coherent in nature for waves propagating horizontally through the canopy, which necessitated the development of a coherent-field model that uses Bragg scattering to account for the observed interference pattern in the transmitted beam. As the wavelength is made shorter, the semi-random spacing between plants becomes significant relative to the wavelength, thereby destroying the coherent properties of the propagating field, in which case propagating wave becomes partially incoherent in nature.;Because of the short path lengths associated with oblique propagation through the canopy, Bragg scattering need not be considered and a much simpler formulation was found to provide good agreement with experimental observations. |
