Optics in Atmospheric Propagation and Adaptive Systems

Contributions are invited on the following topics and those related to them: 

• Characterization of the Propagation Environment: 

profiles of temperature, humidity, extinction, refractivity, radiance (also non-LTE), optical turbulence; updates of transmission and radiance codes, atmospheric refraction, atmospheric turbulence, VIS and IR backgrounds, statistics of propagation parameters. 

• Propagation and Imaging through Optical Turbulence:  

meteorological models, the strong turbulence regime, laser beam propagation, laser speckle effects; correction methods for atmospheric effects in remote sensing, compensation for anisoplanatism and scintillation. 

• Propagation and Imaging through Inhomogenous and Dense Media:  

laser beam propagation, scattering and multiple scattering effects, the strong turbulence regime, aero-optic and jet plume effects, laser speckle effects; correction methods for atmospheric effects; coherent and incoherent imaging in anisoplanatic conditions; laser beam projection on an extended target; target-in-the-loop propagation and compensation in atmospheric turbulence. 

• Laser-based Sensing and Laser Communication: 

 laser beam focusing, sensing, and free-space communication, system and atmospheric simulations, hardware configurations, communications theory issues, bandwidth limits, multiplexing issues, adaptive optics use for increased performance, atmospheric modelling, and laser speckle and other noise sources, loss of coherence for active (laser) systems. 

• Techniques for Mitigation of Atmospheric Effects on Systems:  

adaptive optics, deconvolution, sensor fusion, post processing etc; multi-conjugate adaptive optics, compensated imaging systems, etc. 

• New Devices for Atmospheric Measurement or Compensation:  

 novel optical components such as liquid crystal and MEMS devices, wavefront sensors, high-frame rate and low-noise IR detectors.