Study of Scintillation for Infrared Laser Beam Propagating in Atmospheric Turbulence on Earth-Space Paths

On earth-space paths, by applying a modification of the Rytov method that incorporates spatial frequency filter function under strong atmosphere fluctuation conditions, a tractable model is developed for the scintillation index of infrared laser Gaussian beam wave that is valid under moderate-to-strong irradiance fluctuations. At Infrared band, based on ITU-R C²_n model, the scintillation indexes for collimation laser beam are predicted by this analytic model. The results agree with theoretic expected scintillation. This scintillation model can be converted into a plane or a sphere wave scintillation index model on earth-space paths, and also reduced to a Gaussian beam wave model on horizontal sight paths of invariable C²_n.