Simulating Bistatic Scatter from Surfaces Covered with Vegetation

Many exper imental and t heoretical stud ies have shown that the use of active sys te ms for moni toring plant biom ass suffers from saturation problems. The possibility of overcoming t his limit by consideri ng a bist ati c configuration is t heoret ically analyzed for the case of su nflower fields. An electromagnetic model , already developed and valid ated on active and pass ive data, has been mod ified to yield the bistat ic scattering coefficient, To t his end , coherent sca ttering from t he soil has been included , which resulted to be th e most relevan t component of specular scat tering. Accord ing to model simulat ions, t he specular scatterin g cross section norma lized to area does not exhibit seve re sat urat ion effects and shows a better sensit ivity to biomass at higher frequencies .