Abstract

Of the many error sources associated with airborne laser hydrography, one of the potentially most serious is the effect of underwater light propagation, i.e., the scattering of the optical beam into a cone of steadily increasing angle. The basic premise of airborne laser hydrography is that the water depth can be determined by measuring the round-trip transit time for a short-duration light pulse which travels to the bottom and back to the surface along a fixed slanted path which makes a known angle from the vertical.

© 1982 Optical Society of America