Fractal based Modeling of Altimeter Data

This paper presents a new systematic simulation procedure to compute the altimeter signal return, thus showing the correlation of the signal return shape with height, slope, sub-surface layers and different scales of roughness of the surface of interest. For the first time, and as appropriate to natural surfaces, the scene is fully modelled by means of the fractal geometry. By observing the results presented in this paper, it appears that an advanced processing of altimeter data is possible.