Determining the spectrum of locally isotropic turbulence from optical measurements

An analysis is conducted to demonstrate the feasibility of determining the energy spectrum of turbulence from the temporal characteristics of the signal from a photo receiver at the output of an optical system picking up the light field passing through a layer of a given randomly inhomogeneous medium. The medium is moving with an ordered velocity perpendicular to the axis of the optical system, and the dielectric constant field has n fixed increments along the space and time coordinates. In the Born approximation it is shown that the relationship of the temporal statistical characteristics of the photo receiver signal to the energy spectrum of the optical inhomogeneities depends essentially on the statistical hypothesis used concerning the optical characteristics of the medium.