Scintillation: theory vs. experiment

Abstract

In May 2004 a joint atmospheric propagation experiment was conducted between the Australian Defence Science and Technology Organisation, the Office of Naval Research and the University of Central Florida. A 45 mm divergent Gaussian beam was propagated along a horizontal 1500 meter path approximately 2 meters above the ground. At the receiver were 3 apertures of diameter 1mm, 5mm, and 13mm. The scintillation was measured at each aperture and compared to scintillation theory, recently developed for all regimes of optical turbulence. Three atmospheric parameters, <i>C_n²</i>, <i>l_o</i> and <i>L_o</i>, were inferred from these optical measurements. Simultaneously, a commercial scintillometer, which recorded values for <i>C_n²</i>, was set up parallel to the optical path. In this paper, a numerical scheme is used to infer the three atmospheric parameters and comparisons are made with the <i>C_n²</i> readings from the scintillometer.