A Cutoff Invariant Two-Scale Model in Electromagnetic Scattering From Sea Surfaces

The two-scale model (TSM) is one of the most frequently employed approaches in scattering from multiscale surfaces such as ocean surfaces. It consists of combining geometrical optics (GO) with the small-perturbation model (SPM) to be able to cope with both the small- and large-scale components of the surface. However, well-known shortcomings of this method are the arbitrariness of the dividing scale and the sensitivity of the scattering cross section to the choice of this parameter. We propose to replace SPM with the first-order small-slope approximation (SSA1) to treat the small-scale roughness and derive the formulas for the corresponding TSM, referred to as GO-SSA. We show that GO-SSA is robust to the choice of the frequency cutoff and give a numerical illustration for the sea surface.