Atmospheric Models Of Optical Turbulence

Optical turbulence is observed to cause beam wander, scintillation, small coherence lengths, limited bandwidths and isoplanatism constraints on the propagation of visible wavelength laser beams. Developers of laser systems and electro-optical systems need to know and employ the appropriate representations of turbulence in order to estimate their real system performance. Unfortunately, there exists only a limited number of measurements of optical turbulence. Hence it is crucial that the extent and limitation of current models of optical turbulence be understood. A review of past and present models that describe turbulence throughout the atmosphere is presented. The utility and limitation of these models is determined by comparison to various measurements. Models represent a compromise in representing averaged data and may never represent any specific single optical turbulence altitude profile.