Electromagnetic scattering interaction between a dielectric cylinder and aslightly rough surface

An electromagnetic scattering solution for the interaction between a dielec tric cylinder and a slightly rough surface is presented in this paper. Taki ng the advantage of a newly developed technique that utilizes the reciproci ty theorem, the difficulty in formulating the secondary scattered fields fr om the composite target reduces to the evaluation of integrals involving th e scattered fields from the cylinder and polarization currents of the rough surface induced by a plane wave. Basically, only the current distribution of isolated scatterers are needed to evaluate the interaction in the far-fi eld region. The scattered field from the cylinder is evaluated in the near- field region using a stationary phase approximation along the cylinder axis . Also, the expressions for the polarization current induced within the top rough layer of the rough surface derived from the iterative solution of an integral equation are employed in this paper, A sensitivity analysis is pe rformed for determining the dependency of the scattering interaction on the target parameters such as surface root mean square (rms) height, dielectri c constant, cylinder diameter, and length. It is shown that for nearly vert ical cylinders, which is of interest for modeling of vegetation, the cross- polarized backscatter is mainly dominated by the scattering interaction bet ween the cylinder and the rough surface, The accuracy of the theoretical fo rmulation is verified by conducting polarimetric backscatter measurements f rom a lossy dielectric cylinder above a slightly rough surface. Excellent a greement between the theoretical prediction and experimental results is obt ained.