Rough surface effects on active and passive microwave remote sensing of soil moisture at L-band using 3D fast solution of Maxwell's equations

The forthcoming Water Cycle Observation Mission (WCOM) is to understand the water cycle system among land, atmosphere, and ocean. In both active and passive microwave remote sensing of soil moisture, the surface roughness plays an important role. Electromagnetic models of roughness provide tables of emissivities and backscattering coefficients that can be used to retrieve soil moisture. In this paper, a fast and accurate three dimensional solution of Maxwell’s equations is developed and employed to solve rough soil surface scattering problem at L-band. The algorithm combines QR Pre-Ranked Multilevel UV(MLUV) factorization and Hierarchical Fast Far Field Approximation. It is implemented using OpenMP interface for fast parallel calculation. In this algorithm, 1) QR based rank predetermined algorithm is derived to further compress the UV matrix pairs obtained using coarse-coarse sampling; 2) at the finer levels, MLUV is used straightforwardly to factorize the interactions between groups, while at the coarsest level, interactions between groups in the interaction list are calculated using an elegantly derived Hierarchical Fast Far Field Approximation (HFAFFA) to accelerate the calculation of interactions between large groups while keeping the accuracy of this approximation; 3) OpenMP interface is used to parallelize this new algorithm. Numerical results including the incoherent bistatic scattering coefficients and the emissivity demonstrate the efficiency of this method.