Theoretical Study on Polarimetric Features of Microwave Scattering from Sea Surface

In recent years, with the advance of SAR technology, polarimetric SAR has been used to observe oceanic phenomenon. Full-polarized SAR could collect not only the intensity of echoes backscattered from targets, but also the phase information between different polarimetric channels. Polarimetric features, which are usually extracted from SAR images, are related with the physical and geometrical properties of scatterers. In order to better understand the polarimetric features of the microwave signals scattered from sea surface, theoretical investigations are needed. For this, in the framework of the conventional two-scale model, a theoretical model is proposed to simulate the polarimetric parameters of the microwave echoes from sea surface. The numerical simulations are compared with the results extracted by the L-band full polarized UAVSAR image. And the comparisons demonstrate that our theoretical model can be used to estimate the polarimetric features of microwave scattering from sea surface in the incident angle interval from 25 degrees to 60 degrees.