Marine environment optical propagation measurements

We describe the status and initial results of a long term campaign to measure the effects of atmospheric turbulence upon a horizontally directed laser beam, whose altitude above the sea surface is 2 metres. The measurements are made with a video rate Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensor. Currently the source-receiver distance is 110 metres and additional sites have been identified to extend this single pass geometry to around 1 km. To date we have sampled over 70 hours of data, from December 2003 to April 2004. The preliminary scintillation power spectra and phase structure functions have been determined for some of the data sets, which we present here.

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