Data ranging from L to Ka band were collected from radars mounted on the Forschungsplatform Nordsee during the Synthetic Aperture Radar and X Band Ocean Nonlinearities experiment in November 1990. In this paper we examine, for each of these radars, the total amplitude probability density function (pdf) of the field backscattered from the ocean surface. These pdfs are compared with predictions from a simulation based on our time-dependent scattering model. We find that for lower incidence angles (~20¿), the agreement between the measured and computed pdfs is generally quite good. At these small incidence angles the behavior of the pdfs is determined by the local tilting of the long-wave surface. No modulation of the shortwave spectral density over the long-wave phase is needed to obtain good agreement. For larger incidence angles (~45¿) the agreement between the measured and predicted pdfs is not so good; the major discrepancy is that the tails of the predicted pdfs are somewhat too short. In this study we have attemped to account for the hydrodynamic modulation of the short-scale waves using an approximate procedure based on the assumption that the hydrodynamic modulation is due to the interaction of the short-scale waves with the orbital velocity of the long waves. With this procedure we are able to obtain agreement between the measured and computed pdfs at 45¿ incidence, although the strength of the hydrodynamic modulation needs to be adjusted. Our simulation procedure will be discussed in some detail. Also, we will show how our results are related to more conventional measurements of so-called modulation transfer functions and give some arguments as to why in many cases the correlation between the backscattered power and the long-wave surface velocity can be rather low. ¿ American Geophysical Union 1994