Cloud, fog, and aerosol effect on the MTF of optical systems

A numerical code is used to examine the features of the effect of atmospheric turbidity on the modulation transfer function of an optical system operating on ground, on an airplane or a satellite. Models of size distributions and optical properties of particulate suspended in the atmosphere are considered. The relevant scattering phase functions are calculated by Mie theory and are later used by a code using both Monte Carlo and geometrical optics procedures to evaluate the contribution of atmospheric turbidity to the augmentation of the point spread function. Comparison of ours with other researchers procedures is shown. The effect of atmospheric turbidity is evaluated as due to the presence of scatterers (the secondary sources) whose defocused images are distributed on the plane of the image of the primary source. The positions of the scatterers are determined by a Monte Carlo procedure, while the contribution of each secondary source to the irradiance on the image plane is evaluated by means of geometrical optics. Cases of different aerosols types, geometry aspects of viewing through the atmosphere and atmospheric absorption effects on the MTF are shown.

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