TURBulence Ocean Lidar (TURBOL): preliminary results of laboratory experiments
Abstract:
Observing changes in turbulence at the synoptic scale is quite challenging. Research vessels provide a limited geographic/temporal coverage and most systems used to characterize turbulence use in situ instrumentations which disturb the flow and affects turbulence itself.
Lidar observations are a promising way to study the ocean properties. Polarization is one of the three key properties of light, in addition to intensity and color (frequency). Each of these properties provides different information about the medium the light passes through, however the information provided by polarization is unique in characterizing the properties of the media. Underwater polarization can be used to study the optical signature of inorganic particles in coastal waters from remote sensing and recent research has shown that scattering due to optical turbulence can be expressed as a function of the depolarization rate.
The TURBulence Ocean Lidar is an experimental system, aimed at characterizing underwater turbulence by examining various Stokes parameters.
In this presentation, we propose to discuss several results from the laboratory setup of the lidar system, including how the polarization signature is affected by the turbulence intensity. Although the effect on the degree of polarization appears to be a monotonic function of turbulence intensity, our results suggest that the way the light intensity shifts between the different Stokes parameter is much more complex. While this is not unexpected from a theoretical point of view, this has different implications on the optimal configurations of ocean lidar system based on polarization.