Detection of optical pulses: the effect of atmospheric scintillation

Refractive index inhomogeneities within the path traversed by a pulse of optical energy cause a nonuniform energy distribution across the wavefront of the pulse known as scintillation. It has been shown that this energy variation has a log normal distribution, characterized by a variance sigmaE(2), which is a function of the degree of atmospheric turbulence. In this paper, we derive an expression for the detection probability of an optical pulse that has scintillation with a log normal variance sigmaE(2) in the presence of normally distributed optical noise characterized by variance sigmaN(2). The result is a convolution of scintillation and receiver detection statistics. The results of several calculations using different SNRs are presented graphically.