Optical propagation across the Chesapeake Bay: comparison of experiment to theory

Optical propagation through deep turbulence is important to understand for applications such as free space optical communication The United States Naval Research Laboratory has maintained a 16 km range across the Chesapeake Bay for over a decade. A 1550 nm beam is transmitted from one end to the other where a variety of instruments measure optical parameters such as transmission, scintillation index, aperture averaging, and angle of arrival variation. In addition, meteorological parameters are collected using a weather station at CBD as well as NOAA buoys on the bay. In this work, we present comparisons of measurement optical scintillation index, distribution functions and aperture averaging to calculations using extended Rytov theory and and wave optics calculations.