Some applications of Rice formulas to waves

Jean-Marc Azaïs, José R. León, Mario Wschebor

Published 2009-10-05Version 1

We use Rice's formulas in order to compute the moments of some level functionals which are linked to problems in oceanography and optics. For instance, we consider the number of specular points in one or two dimensions, the number of twinkles, the distribution of normal angle of level curves and the number or the length of dislocations in random wavefronts. We compute expectations and in some cases, also second moments of such functionals. Moments of order greater than one are more involved, but one needs them whenever one wants to perform statistical inference on some parameters in the model or to test the model itself. In some case we are able to use these computations to obtain a Central Limit Theorem.