An Ocean Wave Spectrum Derived from Polarimetric Microwave Radiometer Data

This paper presents a detailed analysis of a simplified Two-Scale Model for ocean surface polarimetric microwave emission, and investigates the extent to which varying ocean surface length scales contribute to brightness temperature zeroth and second azimuth harmonics. The Two-Scale Model can be expressed as a weighting function M^0,2 multiply ocean surface curvature spectrum C^0,2. This implies a simple way to investigate the effect of curvature spectrum on ocean emission. It is found that ocean waves with wavelengths both comparable to and much greater than the electromagnetic wavelength can contribute to these harmonics, depending on the value of the ocean surface spectrum in these length scales. An ocean wave spectrum was derived from polarimetric microwave radiometer data according to constrained linear least-squares method.