Methods currently used for the generation of wind roughened sea surfaces suffer shortcomings in that they either generate sea surface heights that are symmetric about the mean surface height, or that they generate wave slope fields that do not necessarily have the correct slope distribution or correlation. A computationally efficient solution to this problem was developed for the one-dimensional case, i.e. the up and down movements of a single point on a sea surface in time. The following paper describes a generalization of this approach in two dimensions, which allows generation of a two-dimensional slope field with both the correct distribution of instantaneous surface slopes and the correct correlation of these slopes. The problem of integrating the resulting correlated non-Gaussian slope field into a height field remains unsolved at this point in time, as the height fields obtained by a straight forward integration show some artefacts and are hence not entirely satisfactory. Nevertheless, the method is an improvement on some of the algorithms currently in use where a correlated slope field is generated by convolving a field of independent slope values, drawn from a Cox-Munk distribution, with a spatial filter derived from the Pierson-Moskowitz power spectral density (PSD) of surface heights.

Date Published: 8 September 1995
PDF: 11 pages
Proc. SPIE 2552, Infrared Technology XXI, (8 September 1995); doi: 10.1117/12.218215

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 2552:
Infrared Technology XXI
Bjorn F. Andresen; Marija Strojnik, Editor(s)