Measurement of the mueller matrix for ocean water

Abstract

The sixteen element light scattering polarization matrix has been measured for ocean water, and phytoplankton cultures, using an electro-optic light scattering polarimeter. This instrument was an order of magnitude more accurate than previous instruments used to make these measurements. Measurements were done on samples from the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and the Gulf of Mexico. The polarization effects in the matrices have, in general, a form which is similiar to polarization effects in the Rayleigh scattering approximation; for example, all off-diagonal matrix elements except S12 and S21 were zero. Several phytoplankton cultures were measured and all were similar to the measured ocean water data. The most significant difference was in cultures of Synechococcus-sp in which the S33 element was zero at 100(DEGREES) rather than 90(DEGREES) - 95(DEGREES) as in ocean water. Mueller matrix elements were calculated using a Mie computer code and compared to the measured matrices for ocean water. Although the matrix elements were not similar for many distributions, a simple one component distribution was found to produce a reasonably good fit.