Scintillation: theory vs. experiment

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, Cn2, lo and Lo, were inferred from these optical measurements. Simultaneously, a commercial scintillometer, which recorded values for Cn2, 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 Cn2 readings from the scintillometer.