Simultaneous estimation of radiation phase function and albedo in natural waters

An inverse analysis for simultaneous estimation of the radiation phase function and the single scattering albedo in natural waters, from the knowledge of scalar and plane irradiances, is presented. The analysis involves a forward model that utilizes an analytical discrete-ordinates method for solving the radiative transfer equation and an inverse model which contains an algorithm for least-squares estimation that is iteratively solved for retrieving the desired optical properties. The experimental data are simulated with synthetic data corrupted with noise. The results show that the optical properties can be recovered with high accuracy, even for very noisy data.