Polarimetric Passive Remote Sensing

We seek to understand and predict the evolution of the brightness temperature (four Stokes parameters) of wind­ driven foam-covered ocean surfaces. The correlation of polarimetric variation is studied as function of the medium state, modeled as a rough surface (ocean) overlayed by a random medium (foam). Many independent results are obtain by using a wide variety of electromagnetic techniques, such as radiative transfer, integral equation, finite-difference time-domain, etc. Depending on the technique chosen, the foam cover­ age is modeled as either a dense medium composed of densely packed scatterers, a dielectric layer of non-uniform thickness or a succession of volumetric scatterers.