Optical remote sensing of atmospheric turbulence: a comparison with simultaneous thermal measurements.

In this paper we describe a two-part experiment: measuring atmospheric turbulence both optically and thermally from 2 km up to the stratosphere. The consistency of the results shows that the optical technique may be a powerful tool for studying atmospheric turbulence from ground-based equipment.

Daytime r(0) evaluated from vertical microthermal measurements.

The usefulness of parameter r(0) for describing the effect of atmospheric turbulence on wavefront distortion sensitive optical systems has been widely discussed. In this paper we present in situ daytime r(0) measurements (5500 A, Zenith propagation) obtained from balloon-borne microthermal radiosondes. We find that the parameter r(0) is log normal distributed at various levels aloft and that r(0) follows a power law in the 100-10,000-m range.