| 摘要 |
An optical scintillometer is provided which is operative to measure atmospheric turbulence intensity up to a distance of two and a half kilometers. The optical scintillometer provides real time continuous measurements of turbulence intensity in the field of operations employing a transmitter, receiver, and digital processing circuitry. The signal is digitized before comparison with a threshold to eliminate events attributable to objects moving through the path of the optical transmitter and receiver. The system is thereby able to perform calculations to adjust the first order log-amplitude variance function in the saturation regime. An extremely important aspect of the invention is the digitization of the signal and its comparison with the threshold signal. Because a digital signal is compared with a threshold signal level, invalid signal inputs are excluded from the calculation of path-averaged turbulence intensity. The exclusion of such signals assures the data quality in computing the refractive turbulence intensity even when there is an interruption of the infrared beam. This feature is critical for the data processing. Data produced when the optical path is obstructed by moving vehicles, pedestrians, and airplanes is not used for processing to protect the quality of the output measurements.
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