Sea surface slope statistics from a low-altitude aircraft

A new combination of sensors for concurrent aircraft measurement of surface waves and turbulent fluxes has been developed. A simple three laser altimeter arrangement is used to directly measure the 2-D slope of intermediate scale waves and the surface wave profile. A CW scatterometer at Ka-band is used to infer changes in the shorter-scale (less than 1 m) slope variance. This NOAA Long-EZ aircraft then provides high resolution air-sea data with application to such topics as the modulation transfer function, large-scale atmospheric impacts on the sea surface, and characterization of sea surface statistics.