Using stellar scintillation for studies of turbulence in the Earth’s atmosphere

Abstract

International audienceStellar scintillation observed through the Earth's atmosphere is the result of interaction of light waves and the turbulent atmosphere. This review is dedicated to using stellar scintillation measurements for studies of turbulence in the Earth's atmosphere. We present an overview of ground-based, air-borne and satellite stellar scintillation measurements, discuss the approaches to data analyses and give an overview of the main geophysical results. We also discuss the benefits of the scintillation method in studies of the structure of air density irregularities and its limitations

Turbulent mixing and beyond: non-equilibrium processes from atomistic to astrophysical scales I

“…Stellar scintillation, or the twinkling of the stars, is the result of interaction of stellar light with the turbulence present in the Earth's atmosphere, as first noted by Rayleigh. The article by Sofieva et al [11] dwells on stellar scintillation measurements in the Earth's atmosphere and presents an overview of ground-based, air-borne and satellite measurements of stellar scintillation; it also provides an overview of the approaches to data analyses. In order to obtain the information about the Earth's atmospheric turbulence, which must be contained in observations, a solution of the inverse problem is required.…”

“…Volume 1 consists of papers by Wang & Peters [1] on turbulence; by Klimenko [2] on thermodynamics and mixing; by Volpert et al [3] on anomalous diffusion; by Sukoriansky & Galperin [4] on analytical modelling of geophysical flows; by Bershadkii [5] on data interpretation in climate modelling; by Lozovatsky & Fernando [6] on measure for stirring efficiency in natural environments; by Majda & Gershgorin [7] on non-local diffusivity in climate variations; by Frederiksen et al [8] on stochastic modelling of geophysical flows; by Shu [9] on application of high-order accurate nonlinear schemes in simulations of compressible flows; by Radtke et al [10] on hybrid atomistic-continuum dynamic simulations of multi-scale kinetic problems; and by Sofieva et al [11] on measurements of stellar scintillations for quantification of atmospheric turbulence. These papers represent the broad variety of themes of the 'Turbulent mixing and beyond' programme [12] and are concerned with the fundamental aspects of turbulence, mixing and nonequilibrium dynamics.…”

Variable anisotropy of small-scale stratospheric irregularities retrieved from stellar scintillation measurements by GOMOS/Envisat

“…The approximation of weak scintillations (normalized scintillation variance σ 2 I 1) (Tatarskii, 1961(Tatarskii, , 1971) allows using simple linear relations between the 3-D wave number spectrum of atmospheric irregularities and the 2-D scintillation spectrum (Gurvich and Brekhovskikh, 2001;Gurvich and Kan, 2003b;Sofieva et al, 2007a). For low-orbit satellites, weak scintillations approximation is typically valid for altitudes above 30 km (Gurvich and Kan, 2003a;Sofieva et al, 2007a).…”

“…Stellar scintillations in occultation experiments are widely used for probing the atmospheric irregularities of planets and their satellites (Hubbard et al, 1988;Raynaud et al, 2004) and the Earth atmosphere (Gurvich and Kan, 2003a, b;Gurvich et al, 2007;Sofieva et al, 2007aSofieva et al, , b, 2009. The phase screen approximation (Gurvich, 1984;Hubbard et al, 1978) and the theory of weak scintillations (Tatarskii, 1961(Tatarskii, , 1971 provide the basis for analyses of scintillation measurements and reconstructing the parameters of atmospheric irregularities.…”

Anisotropy of small-scale stratospheric irregularities retrieved from scintillations of a double star α-Cru observed by GOMOS/ENVISAT

“…This method allows reconstruction of all parameters of the spectral model except for the anisotropy coefficient of anisotropic irregularities, because scintillation auto-spectra are not sensitive to this parameter provided it is large. Detailed discussion of the methods, their possibilities and limitations is presented in the review (Sofieva et al, 2012).…”