Effect of atmospheric spectrum models on scintillation in moderate turbulence

Experimental studies have shown that a ‘bump’ occurs in the atmospheric spectrum just prior to turbulence cell dissipation. In weak optical turbulence, this bump affects calculated scintillation. The purpose of this study was to determine if a simpler non-bump atmospheric power spectrum can be used to model scintillation for plane waves and spherical waves in moderate to strong optical turbulence regimes. Scintillation expressions were developed from an ‘effective’ von Karman spectrum using an approach similar to that used by Andrews et al. in developing expressions from an effective modified (bump) spectrum. The effective spectrum extends the Rytov approximation into all optical turbulence regimes using filter functions to eliminate mid-range turbulent cell size effects to the scintillation index. Filter cutoffs were established by matching to known weak and saturated scintillation results. The resulting new expressions track those derived from the effective bump spectrum fairly closely. In extremely strong turbulence, differences are minimal.