Simple method to measure effects of horizontal atmospherical turbulence at ground level

Abstract

The Kolmogorov’s theory has been used to explain physical phenomena like the vertical turbulence in atmosphere, others recent works have made new advances and have improved K41 theory. In addition, this theory has been applied to studying different issues associated to measure atmospheric effects, and have special interest to find answers in optics to questions as e.g. at ground level, Could it find edges of two or more close objects, from a distant observer? (Classic resolution problem). Although this subject is still open, we did a model using the statistics of the centroid and the diameter of the laser beam propagated under horizontal turbulence at ground level until the object plane. The goal is to measure efficiently the turbulence effects in the long horizontal path propagation of electromagnetic wave. Natural movement of laser beam within the cavity needs be subtracted from the total transversal displacement in order to obtain a best approach. This simple proposed method is used to find the actual statistics of the centroid and beam diameter on the object plane where the turbulence introduces an additional transversal shift. And it has been tested for different values of horizontal distances under non-controlled environment in a synchronized acquisition scheme. Finally, we show test results in open very strong turbulence with high controlled temperature. This paper presents the implemented tests mainly into laboratory and discuss issues to resolve.