Simulation of Atmospheric Wave-Fronts with Turbulence Intermittency

Abstract

A new extendable method for the simulation of atmospheric wave-fronts with turbulence intermittency is reported. The purpose is to generate simulations consistent with the distributions observed for the turbulence parameters and the seeing, not available with standard methods. The intermittency is included by entering log-normal distributed arrays for the Fried parameter and the spatial coherence outer scale length into an extended form of the phase spectrum. The method is tested on large samples of simulated long-exposure point-source images. The tests show the agreement of the simulations with literature data. The simulations show that the intermittency affects negligibly the long-term median image size but breaks the symmetry of the wave-front phase spectrum, scatters the phase structure function and changes the image profile.