A measurement of microwave backscattering coefficients of rice plants

An experiment to measure microwave backscattering coefficients of rice plants was carried out with a microwave FM-CW scatterometer. An experiment was carried out in such a manner that the scatterometer was moved on a pair of rails along a rice field and was fixed to observe a selected area in that rice field for some duration. The fading characteristics of backscat1;ering signals deviate from the Rayleigh distribution, because rice plants were planted at regular intenals in the field. It was tried to derive properties inhere to rice plants from the probability density distribution, power spectrum and auto-correlation function of the fading signals. The probability density distribution functions of scattered power is approximated by an expansion in terms of Sonine's normalized orthogonal polynomials.