Temporal power spectra of irradiance scintillation for infrared optical waves' propagation through marine atmospheric turbulence

Current theoretical temporal power spectra models of an optical wave have been developed for terrestrial environments. The interactions between humidity and temperature fluctuations in the marine atmospheric environments make the marine atmospheric turbulence particularly challenging, and the optical waves' propagation through marine turbulence exhibits a different behavior with respect to terrestrial propagation. In this paper, the temporal power spectra of irradiance scintillation under weak marine atmospheric turbulence, which is one of the key temporal statistics to describe the correlation of irradiance fluctuations at different time instances, is investigated in detail both analytically and numerically. Closed-form expressions for the temporal power spectra of irradiance scintillation are derived for infrared plane and spherical waves under weak marine atmospheric turbulence, and they consider physically the influences of finite turbulence inner and outer scales. The final results indicate that the marine atmospheric turbulence brings more effects on the irradiance scintillation than the terrestrial atmospheric turbulence. (C) 2014 Optical Society of America