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Surface Roughness

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Encyclopedia of Planetary Landforms

Definition

Surface roughness describes elevation variations over a particular scale.

Morphometry

The kilometer-scale surface roughness can be characterized using slope-frequency distribution statistics. Radar reflection scatter is often parameterized with root-mean-square (RMS) of slopes (Aharonson et al. 1998), but for laser altimeter datasets (e.g., MOLA), the simplest rank statistics, the median absolute value of slope (median slope), provides better characterization of typical surface slopes at baselines from 0.4 to 25 km (Kreslavsky and Head 1999).

Surface roughness can also be estimated using radar techniques at the baselines of the order of several to dozens of the wavelength (10 cm to 10 m) as the radar backscatter coefficient is primarily a function of surface roughness at a scale comparable to the radar wavelength (Simpson et al. 1992; Blumberg and Greeley 1994) (Radar Feature).

Calculations of surface roughness using Digital Elevation Models are usually performed with a...

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Energy and Environment, University of São Paulo, Brazil, São Paulo, Brazil

    Carlos H. Grohmann

  2. Planetary Science Research Group, Institute of Geography and Earth Sciences, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary

    Henrik Hargitai

Authors
  1. Carlos H. Grohmann
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  2. Henrik Hargitai
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Correspondence to Carlos H. Grohmann .

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Grohmann, C.H., Hargitai, H. (2014). Surface Roughness. In: Encyclopedia of Planetary Landforms. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-9213-9_633-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-9213-9_633-1

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