Abstract

By use of a laser remote-sensing technique, the fluctuation profiles of the refractive index of the troposphere were measured at Chester, N. J. The measurements were made with a ground-based optical tracker that tracks a retroreflector mounted on a tethered balloon. The balloon was flown at several altitudes and the flux scintillation on the returned beam was measured. From the scintillation data obtained, the structure constant, which is a measure of the strength of turbulence, was estimated as a function of altitude. The measurements were made during day time in the winter of 1969 and the summer of 1970. The average refractive-index-fluctuation profiles for the winter and the summer months show the turbulence close to the ground in summer months to be greater than that in winter months, by approximately a factor of 3.

© 1972 Optical Society of America

Airborne laser-beam scintillation measurements at high altitudes*

Glen J. Morris
J. Opt. Soc. Am. 63(3) 263-270 (1973)

Experiments on Turbulence Characteristics and Multiwavelength Scintillation Phenomena*

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J. Opt. Soc. Am. 62(9) 1040-1049 (1972)

Measuring the turbulence profile in the lower atmospheric boundary layer

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Two-Laser Optical Distance-Measuring Instrument that Corrects for the Atmospheric Index of Refraction

K. B. Earnshaw and E. Norman Hernandez
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Scintillation in an Earth-to-Space Propagation Path

Peter O. Minott
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