On the question of multiple scattering in the troposphere

A criterion is developed to serve as a measure of multiple scattering in the troposphere as a result of dielectric noise. The question to be answered is: What is the probability that any ray of the incident field will be scattered at least twice in a distance R? This useful criterion can serve as a measure of reliability for the usual single-scatter approximations. It is developed in detail for an arbitrary dielectric noise and is applied to a number of special cases. The results indicate that multiple-scattering effects should be of importance in the microwave spectrum.