An Analysis of the Tensor Dielectnc Constant of Sea Ice at Microwave Frequencies

The bilocal approximation of strong fuctuation theory is used to develop a model for the tensor dielectric constant of sea ice that is treated as a random anisotropic medium. The application is a twofold one: first the individual ice grains are treated as pure ice with embedded elongated brine cells with random spacings and sizes and secondly as the combined ice-brine system, which has tensor dielectric properties, with random orientations of the principal axes and random embedded air bubbles. Comparisons with measurements on a variety of ice types over the temperature range 0 to -32 ° C and frequencies from 0.1 to 40 GHz show that the theory is able to account quantitatively for large parts of the published data including expected scattering corrections to the quasi-static dielectric constant at low salinities and high frequencies.