Study of the turbulence and inner waves in the stratosphere based on the observations of stellar scintillations from space: A model of scintillation spectra

Abstract

Stellar scintillations observed from space through the atmosphere show that density inhomogeneities in the stratosphere are stretched along the Earth's surface. This is true for vertical scales above dozens of metres. The observations reveal the existence of locally isotropic small-scale structure with fluctuation sizes up to fractions of a metre. The subject of this paper is to find out how the rotation of inhomogeneities with respect to the passing ray affects scintillations. Another subject of this study is chromatic aberration in the atmosphere which distorts the scintillation spectra. Numerical modelling within the weak-fluctuation approximation showed that the characteristic value of the anisotropy parameter is equal to the square root of the Earth's radius divided by the atmospheric scale. After the anisotropy exceeds this value, the growth of scintillation variance quickly becomes saturated. Chromatic aberration suppresses the high-frequency branch of the scintillation spectrum. However, information on the structure of isotropic fluctuations with scales up to the Fresnel radius is retained in scintillation spectra for oblique occultations. The model of composing blocks is suggested to develop the approximation for a three-dimensional fluctuation spectrum in the stratosphere. Parameters of these blocks can be determined from the set of measured scintillation spectra.