Download or read book Airborne Lidar Remote Sensing of Coastal Waves and Breaking Distribution written by Paul Hwang and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 10 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A scanning lidar system provides high resolution two-dimensional measurements of ocean wave displacement. The airborne operation further enhances the speed of data acquisition. These properties allow rapid characterization of the ocean wave environment. In addition to active ranging, the scanning optics can obtain passive measurements of surface emissivity, yielding a digital image of the surface brightness on the fly. Processed into a binary image, these measurements can provide information on the average statistics and the spatial distribution of breaking waves. Technical specifications of the system and examples of its application are presented.