ALGORITHM AND CODE TO CALCULATE SPECULAR REFLECTION OF LIGHT FROM A WAVY WATER SURFACE

In studying light and image transfer in sea water the influence of Fresnel surface reflection is as significant as scattering and absorption phenomena. In these cases a knowledge of the reflective properties of sea surface at different wind speeds is very important. At present, little is published about these properties. We present here results of numerical modeling of Fresnel light reflection coefficient of sea water as a function of solar zenith angle and wind speed. The ray-tracing computer model was developed to generate wave slopes and elevations. In order to generate a realistic sea surface the model used Paul Hwang wave height spectrums. The final result of this paper is a simple equation and very fast FORTRAN code to calculate Fresnel reflection coefficient of wavy water surface and specular part of remote sensing reflectance