An Improved Atmospheric Vector Radiative Transfer Model Incorporating Rough Ocean Boundaries

The radiative transfer model (RT3), a vector radiative transfer (VRT) scheme in a plane-parallel atmosphere, was bounded by a rough ocean surface in this study. The boundary problem was solved using a Fourier series decomposition of the radiation field as a function of the azimuth. For the case of a rough ocean surface, the decomposition was obtained by developing both the Fresnel reflection matrix and the probability distribution of the water facet orientation as Fourier series. The effect of shadowing by ocean surface waves was also considered in the boundary condition. The VRT model can compute the intensity and degree of polarization of the light at the top of the atmosphere (TOA), the ocean surface, and any level of the atmosphere in the ocean-atmosphere system. The results obtained by our model are in good agreement with those computed by Ahmad’s model. The simulated results showed that the shadow effects of wave facets on the intensity and the degree of polarization are negligible except at the ocean surface near the grazing angle, possibly because we did not consider the effect of white caps.