Abstract
Measurements of the complete polarized light scattering properties of ocean water have been made for scattering angles from 100 to 1600. The observed normalized Mueller matrices had six non-zero elements whose angular dependences were reminiscent of Rayleigh scat-terers. The remaining 10 elements were zero at all scattering angles. The normalized measurements showed little variability with the location or depth of the sample even though total cross-sections varied by more than an order of magnitude. An average Mueller matrix is presented which represents ocean water scattering effects with a standard deviation of typically less than 10% over the various ocean locations and depths that we observed.