Intensity fluctuations in the case of the specular reflection of light beams in the turbulent atmosphere

Experimental data have been acquired which characterize the magnitude and location of the amplification of the intensity fluctuations of specularly reflected light beams in the turbulent atmosphere. The fluctuation amplification is shown to depend strongly on the diffraction size of the emitting aperture and propagation conditions. In the case of weak fluctuations, the amplification is described sufficiently well by the use of a smooth perturbation method; in the case of strong fluctuations, plane-wave amplification is not observed. High-order normalized moments and histograms of the intensity are compared with corresponding data on log-normal and K distributions. It is shown that the K distribution is not a satisfactory approximation of the probability distribution density of intensity fluctuations.