Effect of natural terrain object on return signal of space based laser altimeter

According to the theory of Fresnel diffraction,a continuous land model was established for natural terrain like desert and grass land,a method of gridding partition was developed to simulate the effect of average surficial height and height mean square error on the properties of return signal,including waveform,power and pulse width.The results show that height mean square error determines the properties of return signal,while the change of terrain mean height cause no difference in return signal in the case of fixed height mean square error.