Electromagnetic modeling of ships in maritime scenarios: Geometrical optics approximation

Global Navigation Satellite System-Reflectometry (GNSS-R), is succesfully employed for ocean altimetric and scatterometric applications. Recently, it has been suggested that GNSS-R can also be used for ship detection applications. To this purpose, an accurate electromagnetic modeling of the bistatic radar cross section of a ship lying over the sea surface would be very helpful. However, existing models are typically limited to monostatic configurations, thus restricting their applicability in multistatic scenarios, such as GNSS-R systems. In this work, we show a procedure to determine the bistatic radar cross section of a ship target, under the geometrical optics approximation. Numerical results show the impact of the geometry of acquisition and polarization on the bistatic radar cross section.