BISTATIC SPECULAR SCATTERING FROM ROUGH DIELECTRIC SURFACES

An experimental investigation was conducted to determine the nature of bistatic scattering from rough dielectric surfaces at 10 GHz. This paper focusses specifically on the dependence of coherent and incoherent scattered fields on surface roughness for the specular direction. The measurements, which were conducted for a smooth surface with ks < 0.2 (where k = 2 pi/lambda and s is the rms surface height) and for three rough surfaces with ks = 0.5, 1.39, and 1.94, included observations over the range of incidence angles from 20 degrees to 65 degrees for both horizontal and vertical polarizations. For the coherent component, the reflectivity was found to behave in accordance with the prediction of the Physical Optics model, although it was observed that the Brewster angle exhibited a small negative shift with increasing roughness. The first-order solution of Physical Optics also provided good agreement with observations for hh-polarized incoherent scattering coefficient, but it failed to predict the behavior of the vv-polarized scattering coefficient in the angular range around the Brewster angle. A second-order solution is proposed which appears to partially address the deficiency of the Physical Optics model.