Temporal spectrum of atmospheric scintillation and the effects of aperture averaging and time averaging

The general analytic expression for the temporal spectrum of atmospheric scintillation under weak turbulence condition is derived. It was employed to study the characteristics of the temporal spectra for horizontal uniform path and whole layer atmospheric non-uniform path. In the non-uniform path, the H-V turbulence model and the Gaussian wind speed model are utilized. It has been found that when the receiver diameter is larger than Fresnel scale (λL)1/2, the temporal spectrum of the plane wave have a power law behavior with a scaling index – 17/3 in high-frequency range. The change of the turbulence strength has little influence on the shape of the temporal spectrum. Based on the characteristics of the temporal spectrum, the aperture-averaging and time-averaging effects on scintillation were analyzed in the frequency domain.