Eigenvalue Analysis of Airborne Multichannel Sea Data for Ocean Monitoring

This paper investigates the eigenvalue distributions of multichannel sea data for different sea states and for data sets where wave breaking occurred. The eigenvalue distributions of real airborne data are evaluated and compared with simulations. This paper demonstrates that the ratio between the second and first eigenvalue can be utilized to gain information about the present sea state and that the Doppler centroid of the second eigenvalue distribution in reference to the first one provides information about the occurrence of wave breaking.