There is a tremendous amount of structure in the photographs taken from the air of the inner shelf. I thought that it would be educational (and fun) to discuss a few photographs in a series of blog posts.

The photographs below were collected on June 28, 2015 during the pilot field experiment. In these photographs, there appears to be a modulation of the reflected light over part of the ocean (enlarge your browser window to see a larger version of the photographs). The wave-like modulation appears to be coming from the northwest, and does not appear to extend the length of the visible along-shore section of the coast.

The pattern is visible in the airborne merged SAR intensity images when the radar to looking towards the NW (link to the SAR image). The wavelength of the feature appears to be roughly 1 km. (The SAR image is a merge of four SAR images, so is not a snapshot in time.)

Anybody have suggestions for what this feature may be? It is an ocean process or an atmospheric process?

(I tried uploading the SAR image to the blog, but I got an error. I’ll update the post with the SAR image if I can figure out how to get the system to accept my file.)