Date of Award

Summer 1982

Document Type

Thesis

Department

Electrical & Computer Engineering

Committee Director

John W. Stoughton

Committee Member

W. Linwood Jones

Committee Member

Burt W. Phillips

Committee Member

William D. Stanley

Call Number for Print

Special Collections; LD4331.E53J3

Abstract

This thesis investigates the response of a radar type sensor, the microwave scatterometer, to meter scale roughness of first-year sea ice. The scatterometer measures the absolute backscattered power from a target, and use of the radar equation permits calculation of the surface reflectivity expressed as the radar scattering coefficient, σ0 also called the normalized radar cross section. This thesis develops an empirical, one dimensional model to predict the backscattered power from ridged first-year sea ice of known surface topography, by interpreting the surface as a series of angular facets and summing the proportional power from each facet. The model is evaluated by comparing the predicted values to scatterometer measure­ments obtained during the National Aeronautics and Space Admin­istration's (NASA's) Sea Ice Radar Experiment (SIRE) in 1978 and 1979.

The input to the model is surface slope which for SIRE was calculated from the ice topography, as measured by an airborne laser profiler. By limiting our consideration to first-year ice, the modeled radar backscatter is a function of slope only. The corr­elation between the predicted and the measured power is .62-.68, and it is concluded that the model adequately describes the backscatter from regions of first year sea ice whose dimensions are of a few tens of meters.

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DOI

10.25777/a9kg-7x96

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