Simulation of Temporally Dynamic Atmospheric Turbulence Phase Screen Based on Zernike Polynomials and Modified von-Kármán Spectrum

In the simulation of the atmospheric wavefront, the Kolmogorov spectrum facilitates the mathematical treatments, but this model gives inaccurate predictions in cases where the effects of outer- and inner-scale can not be neglected. Therefore, we derive the covariance formula of Zernike coefficients based on the modified von-Kármán turbulence spectrum to improve the Zernike-based method. Further, using the frozen flow hypothesis, the temporal power spectra of Zernike coefficients are derived, and the effects of wind velocity and direction, as well as the outer and inner scales, are also taken into account. Then, we introduce a method for generating the temporally dynamic atmospheric wavefront using the inverse Fourier transform to draw random time-evolving coefficients from the temporal spectra. We evaluate the performance on simulated atmospheric wavefront, and the results confirm that accurate spatial and temporal statistics are obtained.