Abstract

Interest in the higher-order moments of irradiance scintillation draws attention to extremely large excursions of irradiance. Observation of such excursions has many experimental difficulties involving receiver dynamic range, aperture size, and bandwidth as well as sufficiency of number of samples, surface reflections (mirages), and source divergence. We discuss these difficulties as well as techniques to mitigate them. Visual biases exist in graphical presentations of moments and probability-density functions; we make suggestions for effective graphical interpretation of data. We recommend measuring both the refractive-index structure parameter and the inner scale of turbulence simultaneously with irradiance statistics.

© 1988 Optical Society of America

Probability density of irradiance scintillations for strong path-integrated refractive turbulence

James H. Churnside and R. J. Hill
J. Opt. Soc. Am. A 4(4) 727-733 (1987)

Probability distribution of irradiance for the onset of strong scintillation

Reginald J. Hill and Rod G. Frehlich
J. Opt. Soc. Am. A 14(7) 1530-1540 (1997)

Inner-scale effect on irradiance variance measured for weak-to-strong atmospheric scintillation

Anna Consortini, F. Cochetti, James H. Churnside, and Reginald J. Hill
J. Opt. Soc. Am. A 10(11) 2354-2362 (1993)

Splitting-source model for the statistics of irradiance scintillations

N. Ben-Yosef and E. Goldner
J. Opt. Soc. Am. A 5(1) 126-131 (1988)

Visual perception of moving parts

John Rubin and W. A. Richards
J. Opt. Soc. Am. A 5(12) 2045-2049 (1988)