Co- And Cross-Polarized Scattering from Sea Surface at High Winds

It is known that co-polarized backscattering reaches saturation and damping quickly at high wind speeds. Also, the cross-polarized scattering has higher sensitivity to high wind speed. Motivated by these inherent backscattering characteristics, we explore the linearly and circularly polarized bistatic scattering behaviors at high winds on the whole scattering plane. Numerical results show that, for HH polarization, the deep scattering valley appears at the cross-plane. In contrast, VV polarization is not so at cross direction but tends to be so in the forward region. The scattering valley locates in the incident plane for HV and VH polarizations; that is, the depolarization effect is relatively weak in the incident plane. The difference between HV and VH polarizations is complementary to backscattering in the context of winds retrieval. The circular polarization can better retrieve high winds, e.g., 40m/s.