Wind roughened sea surface may produce a strong and broad sun light reflection pattern by tilted wave facets. This pattern, or the sun glitter, is dependent on many competing factors such as wind speed, wind direction, sun-target-sensor configurations and the water refractive index. Understanding the performance of different sun glint models will help improve our abilities to process glint-contaminated ocean color imageries. Using the MODIS measurements at the NIR 859 nm and the two SWIR bands at 1240 and 2130 nm, we performed comparison studies on some popular sun glint models. Specifically, the sun glint models of the Cox and Munk (1954) (including models with input wind speed of isotropic, anisotropic, and anisotropic with higher order (Hermitian) terms), the Ebuchi and Kizu (2002), and Breon and Henriot (2006) are evaluated. In this poster, we present and discuss results from various sun glitter model performance evaluation.
NASA Carbon Cycle & Ecosystems Active Awards Represented by this Poster: