Impact of a Turbulent Ocean Surface on Laser Beam Propagation

Abstract

The roughness of the ocean surface significantly impacts air-to-sea imaging, oceanographic monitoring, and optical communication. Most current and previous methods for addressing this roughness and its impact on optical propagation are either entirely statistical or theoretical, or are ‘mixed methods’ based on a combination of statistical models and parametric-based physical models. In this paper, we performed experiments in a 50-foot-wave tank on wind-generated waves, in which we varied the wind speed to measure how the surface waves affect the laser beam propagation and develop a geometrical optical model to measure and analyze the refraction angle and slope angle of the laser beam under various environmental conditions. The study results show that the laser beam deviations/distortions and laser beam footprint size are strongly related to wind speed and laser beam incidence angle.

Comparative analysis of Bessel higher-order cosh- and sinh-Gaussian beams spreading through oceanic turbulence

“…It is commonly recognized that variations in salinity and temperature affect the refractive index of oceanic turbulence. Research on the effects of oceanic water temperature and salinity fluctuations, as well as the degree of polarization, mutual coherence function, spreading spherical waves, scintillation index, beam wander and average aperture on laser beam propagation have all been extensively studied (Chen et al, 2013;Lu et al, 2014;Baykal, 2016;Yang et al, 2017;Chib et al, 2023;Alharbi et al 2022).…”