A new study of turbulence effects in the marine environment on the intensity distributions of flat-topped Gaussian beams.

In this study, we investigate the effects of maritime atmospheric turbulence on the propagation of flat-topped Gaussian beams within the regime of weak fluctuations. Based on the paraxial approximation and the Rytov theory, the statistical moments, the scintillation index, the probability of fade, and the duration of fade are studied analytically and numerically. The numerical results show that these parameters depend on the beam order, the beam waist, the refractive-index structure parameter, the inner scale of the turbulence and the wavelength. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]