Light propagation through anisotropic turbulence

A wealth of experimental data has shown that atmospheric turbulence can be anisotropic; in this case, a Kolmogorov spectrum does not describe well the atmospheric turbulence statistics. In this paper, we show a quantitative analysis of anisotropic turbulence by using a non-Kolmogorov power spectrum with an anisotropic coefficient. The spectrum we use does not include the inner and outer scales, it is valid only inside the inertial subrange, and it has a power-law slope that can be different from a Kolmogorov one. Using this power spectrum, in the weak turbulence condition, we analyze the impact of the power-law variations α on the long-term beam spread and scintillation index for several anisotropic coefficient values ς. We consider only horizontal propagation across the turbulence cells, assuming circular symmetry is maintained on the orthogonal plane to the propagation direction. We conclude that the anisotropic coefficient influences both the long-term beam spread and the scintillation index by the factor ς(2-α).