Theoretical study of backscatter from rice paddy using discrete scatterer model

For many Asian countries, a rice crop monitoring plays a key role to realize stable food supply. Because of its flexible operability with wide swath, SAR remote sensing has been attractive as an efficient monitoring tool. In this paper, we simulate and understand the backscattering cross sections from rice paddy in terms of polarization orientation angles. Firstly, radar backscatter from rice paddy was theoretically modeled by using Discrete Scatterer Model (DSM). Then numerical simulations were conducted by varying polarization orientation angles. We concluded that the cross polarization shows the highest sensitivity to the angle than the co-polarizations. Especially, the HV was more than the co-polarizations at the 45 degree of the orientation angle for overall growth cycle. This would mislead to estimate the amount of volume scattering component using the current polarimetric decomposition techniques.