Effect of background turbulence in lidar investigations of clear air turbulence

Abstract

The effect of atmospheric turbulence on power fluctuations of backscattered laser radiation at the lidar receiving aperture is estimated for divergent laser beams with the Gaussian intensity distribution in the Rytov approximation. Simple analytic formulas are suggested as estimators of the variance of received power fluctuations. The estimates showed that, for paths about 10 km long and sounding region radii of about 1 m, root mean square values of relative power fluctuations are comparable with the relative variation in the power received when changing from sounding of atmospheric regions with background turbulence to highly turbulent regions (clear air turbulence).