Title :
Sea surface slope statistics from a low-altitude aircraft
Author :
Vandemark, D. ; Crawford, T. ; Dobosy, R. ; Elfouhaily, T. ; Chapron, B.
Author_Institution :
Wallops Flight Fac., NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Wallops Island, VA, USA
Abstract :
A new combination of sensors for concurrent aircraft measurement of surface waves and turbulent fluxes has been developed. A simple three laser altimeter arrangement is used to directly measure the 2-D slope of intermediate scale waves and the surface wave profile. A CW scatterometer at Ka-band is used to infer changes in the shorter-scale (less than 1 m) slope variance. This NOAA Long-EZ aircraft then provides high resolution air-sea data with application to such topics as the modulation transfer function, large-scale atmospheric impacts on the sea surface, and characterization of sea surface statistics
Keywords :
airborne radar; ocean waves; optical radar; remote sensing by laser beam; remote sensing by radar; 10 to 20 m; 2D slope; CW scatterometer; Ka-band; NOAA Long-EZ aircraft; Riegl LD90-3 model; high resolution air-sea data; intermediate scale waves; large-scale atmospheric impacts; laser altimeter; low-altitude aircraft measurement; modulation transfer function; ocean surface waves; sea surface slope statistics; surface wave profile; turbulent fluxes; Aircraft; Atmospheric waves; Large-scale systems; Radar measurements; Sea measurements; Sea surface; Statistics; Surface emitting lasers; Surface waves; Transfer functions;
Conference_Titel :
Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium, 1999. IGARSS '99 Proceedings. IEEE 1999 International
Conference_Location :
Hamburg
Print_ISBN :
0-7803-5207-6
DOI :
10.1109/IGARSS.1999.773504
