Direct Monte Carlo simulation of the ocean surface

Various elements of the ocean surface can focus or defocus light working as the lenses. In the latter case an underwater object can be hidden. When the ocean surface is focusing light, a strong return signal can be detected and misinterpreted as the underwater object at a given depth. Therefore, modeling the electromagnetic wave scattering on the ocean surface requires a mathematical model of a random ocean surface with statistical properties satisfying the experimental data. The main statistical characteristics are the surface spectrum, and probability distribution functions (PDF) of elevations and slopes. Several approaches have been proposed to model the random surface for lidar scattering applications, D.V. Vlasov et al. (1985), G.M. Krekov et al. (1998) and C. Cox et al. (1954). The main disadvantages of these approaches are that they do not simultaneously satisfy several surface statistical characteristics. This problem was overcome by V.V. Tatarskii et al. (1997). This approach is very convenient for analytical calculations of scattering. However, its major drawback is that the generated surface is not ergodic. The present paper gives a new method to generate a random surface with given elevation PDF and slope PDF. The generated surface is used to simulate lidar scattering for different wind speeds