Surface Clutter
The surface clutter return depends upon the nature of the surface, its roughness, the grazing angle (angle the beam makes with the surface), the frequency and the polarisation. The reflected signal is the phasor sum of a large number of individual returns from a variety of sources, some of them capable of movement (leaves, rain drops, ripples) and some of them stationary (pylons, buildings, tree trunks). Individual samples of clutter vary from one resolution cell to another (spatial variation) and vary with time for a given cell (temporal variation).
Read more about this topic: Clutter (radar)
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“The surface of the ground in the Maine woods is everywhere spongy and saturated with moisture.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)