Fractional moments of low order for scintillation statistics

Abstract

Use of fractional moments of low order is here proposed for processing data of intensity fluctuations from optical atmospheric propagation measurements. In this paper we check the accuracy of low order moment estimation and their ability to discriminate which one, among a number of candidate theoretical distributions, better represents the experimental histograms of intensity. The comparison method is tested by sampling sets of data from three popular distributions, that is Ln, LnME and K distribution. Applications to experimental sets of data are also presented.