Generalized Terrain Topography in Radar Scattering Models

Modeling of terrain topography is crucial for vegetated areas given that even small slopes impact and alter the radar wave interactions between the ground and the overlying vegetation. Current missions either exclude pixels with large topographic slopes or disregard the terrain topography entirely, potentially accumulating substantial modeling errors and therefore impacting the retrieval performance over such sloped pixels. The underlying terrain topography needs to be considered and modeled to obtain a truly general and accurate radar scattering model. In this paper, a flexible and modular model is developed: the vegetation is considered by a multilayered multispecies vegetation model capable of representing a wide range of vegetation cover types ranging from bare soil to dense forests. The ground is incorporated with the stabilized extended boundary condition method, allowing the representation of an N-layered soil structure with rough interfaces. Terrain topography is characterized by a 2-D slope with two tilt angles (alpha, beta). Simulation results for an evergreen forest show the impact of a 2-D slope for a range of tilt angles: a 10 degrees tilt in the plane of incidence translates to a change of up to 15 dB in HH, 10 dB in VV, and 1.5 dB in HV for the total radar backscatter. Terrain topography is shown to be crucial for accurate forward modeling, especially over forested areas.