Radar Cross Section Estimation for Entomoligcal Applications: Target Dielectric Characterization and Its Impacts

classifying the behavioral norms of airborne organisms remains and continues to be a topic of growing interest due to their essential impact on environmental and ecological factors. Through electromagnetic characterization, radar cross section (RCS) of airborne insects can be used to provide a complementary study in monitoring and understanding their intriguing behavior. This paper investigates the characterization of airborne insect's RCS through a Method of Moments (MoM) numerical modeling approach. The findings of this study sheds light on the sensitivity of both modeled and measured RCS estimates to the dielectric properties of honeybees and highlights that corrupting effects may not be accounted for accurately in previous literature. Modeling results obtained through simulation studies are validated through rigorous experimental analysis performed on Honeybees, a type of airborne insect. It has been shown that the RCS of Honeybees can be accurately estimated across a wide range of frequencies, incidence angles and polarizations using the modeling approach described herein.