Remote sensing of sand ripples using high-frequency backscatter

Abstract

It is critical for buried target detection via ripple scattering to know the ripple structure, e.g., the ripple height and spatial wavelength. In the present paper, backscattering data from a 300-kHz system show that ripple wavelength and height can potentially be estimated from backscattering images. Motivated by the backscatter data, we have developed a time-domain numerical model to simulate scattering of high-frequency sound by a ripple field. This model treats small-scale scatterers as Lambertian scatterers distributed randomly on the large-scale ripple field. We have found that this approach characterizes the field data well. Numerical simulations are conducted to investigate the possibility of remotely sensing bottom ripple heights and wavelength.