Polarized radiative transfer in media with non-uniform refractive-index distributions

The oceans are home to most of the animal and plant life on Earth and therefore very important for the food supply. To avoid overharvesting of oceanic resources it is necessary to have a solid understanding of the marine environment. Optical remote sensi ng is becoming a very important tool to observe oceanic constituents. A similar method as the one used in optical remote sensing can be used for non-invasive optical detection of skin cancer. The objective of the project is to study polarization effects in systems consisting of two media with different indices of refraction, such as the coupled atmosphere-ocean system or the coupled air-tissue system. We also want to study polarized light distributions close to edges, e.g. ice-edges or edges of lesions, because they are of particular practical interest.