Airborne infrared imagery of breaking ocean waves shows that whitecaps on actively breaking wave crests appear relatively bright while residual whitecaps appear dark compared to the ambient water surface. These differences in relative brightness, which appear to arise from changes in both emissivity and physical temperature, provide a means to investigate the evolution of a breaking wave and may be of some relevance to infrared and microwave remote sensing.
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Marmorino et al. (2005) studied this question.
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