A plane electromagnetic wave scattering by a conducting sphere partially buried in a ground plane

An analytic solution of the problem of a plane electromagnetic wave scattering by a conducting spherical scatterer residing on or partially buried in an infinite perfectly conducting ground plane is formulated in conjunction with the method of images. With imaging, the geometry is replaced by two touching or overlapping spheres in the absence of the ground plane, but with the given incident plane wave and its image plane wave, in order to satisfy the boundary conditions on the ground plane in the original geometry. Numerical results for the normalized scattering cross section at an arbitrary height (or depth) from the ground plane and at any specific angle of incidence are presented graphically, and these are obtained by evaluating the scattered field coefficients by matrix inversion or an iterative scattering procedure.