Power spectrum and fractal dimension of laser backscattering from the ocean

We flew an airborne lidar perpendicular to the coastline along straight-line transects that varied in length between 230 and 280 km. The sample spacing was approximately 3 m, so we sampled almost five decades of spatial scales. Except for the return from right at the surface, the power spectra of backscattered power had a power-law dependence on spatial frequency, with a slope of approximately 1.49. This corresponds to a fractal dimension of 1.76. This implies that the distribution is not as patchy as that of a purely turbulent process.