Copolarized and Cross-Polarized Backscattering From Random Rough Soil Surfaces From L-Band to Ku-Band Using Numerical Solutions of Maxwell's Equations With Near-Field Precondition

We extend the 3-D numerical method of Maxwell's equation (NMM3D) for rough soil surface scattering from L-band to C-, X-, and Ku-bands. We illustrate the results for copolarization, cross-polarization, and polarization ratio (HH/VV). Copolarized and cross-polarized backscattering coefficients from NMM3D are analyzed for frequency dependence, incident angle dependence, and soil moisture dependence. We also cross compare results from analytical and empirical models. The 16 × 16 squared wavelength (λ²) of rough surface is applied for NMM3D using 256 processors on NSF Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment clusters. Polarization ratio, HH/VV, is studied to address the feature of dependence on frequency for same fields (same physical parameters for the model). HH/VV is shown useful to provide additional information to study land surface. Results from NMM3D are also validated with POLARSCAT measurement data-1. NMM3D shows good agreement with data and better performance while considering copolarization, cross-polarization, and polarization ratio (HH/VV) together. The key advancement in computation efficiency in this paper is the implementation of a physically based near-field precondition algorithm in NMM3D to accelerate parallel computation. With precondition, the computation time is faster by ten times for larger root-mean-square height.