A novel integrated radar sounder simulation technique for modelling large and small-scale surface scattering phenomena

Abstract

Radar sounders (RS) play an important role in planetary investigation. However, the complex tasks of predicting performance and interpreting RS data and predicting performance require to perform data simulations. In the literature, there are different methods for RS data simulation, including: i) numerical methods involving the exact solution of Maxwell's equations based on 3D modelling; and ii) methods based on ray-tracing and facet modelling. Among numerical methods, the Finite-Difference Time-Domain (FDTD) technique allows one to precisely model complex nonlinear targets, both geologically and geophysically, at the cost of high computational load. On the contrary, coherent ray-tracing methods reduce the computational cost by triangulating the targets into facets with size comparable to the wavelength. In this work, we combine the advantages of FDTD and ray-tracing methods into a novel integrated simulation technique for modelling scattering phenomena at two scales of wave interaction, i.e. large (facet) scale and small (sub-facet) scale. The coherent facet method is used to simulate facet- scale scattering phenomena, while FDTD is used to evaluate the sub-facet-scale scattering due to roughness on top of the single facets. We investigate the method's effectiveness by generating a one-layer synthetic DEM as a fractional Brownian motion (fBm) process superimposed by different values of RMS slope of the small-scale roughness and by analysing how the received signal changes in terms of signal-to-noise ratio. The results show the effectiveness of the method in representing small-scale roughness realistically.