Abstract
Accurate measurements of oceanic whitecap coverage from whitecap images are required for better understanding air-gas transfer and aerosol production processes. However, this is a challenging task because whitecap patches are formed immediately after a wave breaks and are spread over a wide area. The main challenges in designing whitecaps imaging instrument are the small field of view of the camera lens, processing huge numbers of images, recording data over long time periods, and deployment difficulties in stormy conditions. This paper describes the hardware design of a novel high-resolution optical instrument for imaging oceanic whitecaps and the automated algorithm processing the collected images. The instrument was successfully deployed in 2013 as part of the HiWINGS campaign in the North Atlantic Ocean. The instrument uses a fish-eye camera lens to image the whitecaps in a wide angle of view (180°).
Highlights
Whitecaps formed on the ocean surface after the passage of breaking waves play a significant role in many marine and atmospheric processes, such as air–sea gas exchange [1,2,3], marine aerosol production [4,5,6], and global radiation balance [7]
The most common way to quantify whitecaps is the whitecap coverage, which is the percentage area of the ocean surface covered by the whitecaps [2,8]
This whitecap coverage can be measured from the ocean surface images
Summary
Whitecaps formed on the ocean surface after the passage of breaking waves play a significant role in many marine and atmospheric processes, such as air–sea gas exchange [1,2,3], marine aerosol production [4,5,6], and global radiation balance [7]. Many cameras with standard view angles are required to image whitecap coverage on the wide range. This system requires additional hardware resources that substantially increase the economic and technical challenges. The instrument is based on using a fish-eye lens camera that has a large view angle (180°) This instrument could be further developed in the future to measure the whitecap coverage from all directions
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