Vol. 15, issue 07, article # 9

Abstract:

Return signals of the airborne lidar, used in sensing of seawaters near North Scotland, have been processed. During five flights seawaters have been studied along 100 to 1000-km long routes. The horizontal distribution of the water extinction factor e for sounding radiation was found to be irregular having both the turbidity and transparency spots with the size ranging from 0.5-1 to several tens of kilometers. On the average, the standard deviation of e is 10 to 15%, but in some individual cells, it can reach 30 and even 80%. Energy spectrum of fluctuations of e values in the cells with the size less than 60 km follows, on the whole, the 5/3 exponential law. The autocorrelation function halfwidth for e is up to several kilometers.