UNIVERSAL MULTIFRACTAL INDEXES FOR THE OCEAN SURFACE AT FAR-RED WAVELENGTHS

For some time, ocean wave breaking has been conceptualized as a cascad e process in which the large scale wind energy flux driving the system is dissipated by wave breaking at small scales, the two seperated by the ''equilibrium'' scaling range. Cascades are now known to generical ly lead to multifractals; with special ''universal'' multifractals the oretically predicted. In this paper we use far red (0.95 mum) radiance s at Im resolution obtained from aircraft to test the multifractal beh avior of the ocean surface and estimate the corresponding universal mu ltifractal parameters of the radiance field.