Measurement of the Mueller matrix for ocean water

The normalized light scattering polarization matrix has been measured for ocean water using an electrooptic light scattering polarimeter. Measurements were done on samples from the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and the Gulf of Mexico. The polarization effects in the matrices were found to have, in general, a form which is similar to polarization effects in the Rayleigh scattering approximation; for example, all off-diagonal matrix elements except S12 and S21 were zero. Mueller matrix elements were calculated using a Mie computer code and compared to the measured matrices for ocean water. A simple one-component distribution was found to produce a reasonably good fit.