Abstract

Recently, the problem of propagation of optical radiation through an anisotropic turbulent medium has become important because of the number of experiments on the covering of the Earth’s atmosphere that have been carried out by using satellite measurements. These experiments² showed that the atmospheric turbulence responsible for the fluctuations of the temperature field and the amplitude of the laser emission is strongly anisotropic, with the order of anisotropy larger than 25. The expressions for the correlation and structural functions have been derived by using the anisotropic model of the Obukhov-Kolmogoroff turbulence spectrum³ and the stochastic wave equation:

© 1995 Optical Society of America