Short-term turbulence beam spread revisited.

Abstract

The short-term (ST) turbulent beam spread theory proposed by Charnotskii [Proc. SPIE1968, 389-400 (1993)10.1117/12.154845] was tested against wave-optics simulations and found that it underestimated the degree of turbulent beam spread and exhibited some artifacts in the ST irradiance profiles. We discuss the reasons for the shortcomings of the 1993 model and propose what is believed to be a new model of the ST wave structure function. This model maintains the same level of computational complexity as the 1993 model but shows better agreement with the simulation results.