Influence of wind-roughed sea surface on detection performance of spaceborne oceanic lidar

The wind-roughed sea surface influences the propagation properties of the laser beam and consequently affects the detection accuracy of spaceborne oceanic lidar. A comprehensive analysis of this problem is lacking to date. Herein, the Cox and Munk surface model is applied to the spaceborne oceanic lidar ra-diative transfer emulator to solve this problem. The effects of wind-roughed sea surface on oceanic li-dar laser pulse propagation properties, such as the deflection angle of the direction, the inaccuracy of the signal depth, and the recommended incident angles, are studied using this model. The relationships among the wind speed, the incident angle and the propagation properties of the laser beam when pass-ing through the sea surface are established. The maximum possible error of detection depth is within 8.2% when the wind speed is below 15 m/s and the incident zenith angle is less than 30 degrees. And it can be reduced to 1.8% by profile averaging, which reveals the spaceborne oceanic lidar is capable to detect the global ocean profile information effectively in windy conditions. Moreover, the recommended inci-dent angles for an oceanic lidar system are 37 degrees and 35 degrees, when the effective reflectance of the whitecaps are 0.2 and 0.6, respectively. The conclusions of this paper have reference value for oceanic lidar remote sensing in practice.(c) 2022 Published by Elsevier Ltd.