Gaussian beam propagation in maritime atmospheric turbulence: long term beam spread and beam wander analysis

Laser beam propagation in maritime environment is particularly challenging, not only for scattering and absorption due to high humidity, but also for a different behavior of atmospheric turbulence with respect to terrestrial propagation. Recently, a new power spectrum for the fluctuations of the refractive index in the Earth’s atmosphere has been introduced to describe maritime atmospheric turbulence. This maritime power spectral model shows a characteristic bump, similar to Hill’s bump, that appears when the product between the wavenumber and the inner scale is around unity, 0 1 l . In this paper, under weak turbulence conditions, we use the mentioned maritime power spectrum to analyze long term beam spread, beam wander and Strehl ratio of a Gaussian beam wave propagating through maritime atmospheric turbulence.