An interpretation of altimeter measurements from ocean

In ocean surface scattering many investigators believe that only a certain portion of the sea spectrum is responsible for scattering along a given direction of interest. This is based on the fact that different roughness scales dominate scattering in different directions. As a result when the direction of observation is known, only a certain portion of the surface spectrum is selected for use in a scattering model calculation. For altimeter observations some investigators have excluded the high frequency portion of the sea spectrum in their model calculations leading to effective rather than real parameters in their models. The present authors show an alternative modeling approach where the use of the complete sea spectrum can lead to scattering coefficient estimates in agreement with the TOPEX and other altimeter measurements without resorting to effective model parameters. Furthermore, they demonstrate that there is consistency between the surface slopes derived from this scattering model based on microwave data and optically measured surface slopes