Equipment in Support for Polarimetric Imaging

摘要

The wind-driven sea surface is characterized by wind waves with a wide range of spatial and temporal scales. Small waves, with millimeter to centimeter wavelengths, ride on the longer waves and play a crucial role in fundamental interfacial geophysical processes. These include wind stress, air- sea gas exchange, and optical transmission through the surface, microwave backscatter, amongst others. As well, this small-scale roughness underpins many marine remote sensing technologies, such as scatterometry, altimetry and synthetic aperture radar. These satellite sensors are the primary data sources of winds and waves over the planet's oceans. However, current knowledge of the sea surface roughness is incomplete, especially at these shorter scales, which degrades the accuracy of the satellite data products. To improve both sensor and modeling accuracy for a wide range of air-sea interfacial processes, a more detailed description of the small-scale roughness is needed. As these scales have small amplitudes, but finite steepness, measuring their slope properties is intrinsically well-suited to their characterization.