Many experimental and theoretical studies have shown that the use of active
systems for monitoring plant biomass suffers from saturation problems. The
possibility of overcoming this limit by considering a bistatic configurati
on is theoretically analyzed for the case of sunflower fields. An electroma
gnetic model, already developed and validated on active and passive data, h
as been modified to yield the bistatic scattering coefficient. To this end,
coherent scattering from the soil has been included, which resulted to be
the most relevant component of specular scattering. According to model simu
lations, the specular scattering cross section normalized to area does not
exhibit severe saturation effects and shows a better sensitivity to biomass
at higher frequencies.