An Improved Backscattering Theoretical Model for Snow Area

Abstract

Remote sensing has been studied for a long timeto monitor the earth terrain. Remote sensing technology has been used globally in many different fields and one of the most popular area of study that usesremotesensing technology is snow monitoring.In previous researches, remote sensing has been modelled on snow area to study the scattering mechanisms of variousscattering processes. In this paper, surface volume second order term that was dropped inprevious studyis derived,included and studied to observe the improvement in thesurface volume backscattering coefficient. This new model isapplied on snow layer above ground and the snow layer is modelled as a volume of ice particles as the Mie scatterers that are closely packed and bounded by irregularboundaries.Various parameters are used to investigate the improvement of adding the new term. Results show improvementin cross-polarized return, for all the range of parameters studied.Comparison is made with the field measurement result from U.S. Army Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory (CRREL) in 1990. Close agreement is shown between developed model and data field backscattering coefficient result.

Keywords

• surface volume scattering
• remote sensing
• theoretical modelling
• backscattering coefficient
• radiative tranfer equation