Brightness temperature model of sea foam layer at L-band

Abstract

Permittivity of a sea foam layer is very important in investigating ocean brightness temperature model. At microwave frequency, the Rayleigh method is developed to estimate the effective permittivity of the sea foam layer. To simplify the tedious calculation of sea foam effective permittivity at L band (1.4 GHz), Pade’ approximation is adopted to fit the sea foam effective permittivity computed by the Rayleigh method. With this fitting formula, a new brightness temperature model of sea foam layer defined by certain geophysical parameters, such as air volume fraction (AVF), sea surface temperature (SST), sea surface salinity (SSS) and thickness of foam layer d, is given. Furthermore, the sensitivities of the brightness temperature model to SST, SSS, d and AVF of a sea foam layer at L band are discussed. The sensitivities are ranked from most to least in the order: (1) d; (2) AVF; (3) SSS; (4) SST. This result indicates that the measurement errors of d and AVF have significant impacts on the retrievals of SSS and SST. With the experimental brightness temperature data, the SSS and AFV are retrieved by cost function.