In this manuscript we cover our developments using dual-polarization lidar for bathymetric retrievals. We are investigating the use of this lidar technique to identify surface and bottom returns in shallow water applications. In shallow water the returns for the surface and bottom can overlap and create difficulty when attempting to measure the depth. With our dualchannel approach, we can take advantage of the depolarizing nature of the bottom return. This allows for the surface return to appear strongly in the co-polarized channel while the bottom return appears strongly in the cross-polarized channel. We are testing the use of the wavelet transform on the ratio of cross-polarized signal to co-polarized signal. The wavelet transform can help to identify the surface and bottom returns when the data are noisy. Occasionally, the surface echo will appear in the cross-polarized channel with the bottom echo. Using the depolarization ratio for identifying the bottom echo is advantageous in this case over using the co-polarized or cross-polarized data alone. We will present our current findings as well as discuss potential future approaches to the analysis of the data.
