Fractal Models of Foam Coverage for Ocean Microwave Remote Sensing

Introduction. Methods of fractal geometry are widely used in geophysics and remote sensing for analyses of natural objects and dynamical systems beginning from the fundamental works of Mandelbrot [1]. In particular, in the mid 1990s, a number of authors [2, 3, 4, 5] established an idea that wave breaking and foam/whitecap fields observed in stormy oceans have a universal (multi)fractal characterization. Such a concept was based on an airborne optical and infrared imagery and multiscale data analysis. Indeed, in view of remote sensing (e.g., [6, 7, 8, 9, 10]) fractal methods seem to be a convenient tool for estimations of ocean surface dynamic characteristics including wave breaking processes and foam/whitecap coverage statistics.