Apparent and real roughness

Some works have studied the light scattering from a rough surface immersed in a liquid, where the light scattered from the immersed rough surface was assumed to be equivalent to that scattered from a fictitious rough surface with a different texture. This work deals with this kind of problems analyzing the light scattered by a reflecting strong scatterer and the light scattered by a rough surface immersed in a transparent liquid. The general Kirchhoff solution for scattering from a rough surface has been used.It is shown that under certain conditions, the mean scattered intensity (MSI) from a surface immersed in a liquid can be quasi-indistinguishable from that scattered from a non-immersed surface with an “equivalent texture”. An expression relating the equivalent texture and the immersed surface texture was obtained.The results of this work allow to evaluate the characteristics of any surface immersed in a liquid with a known refractive index.