atmosphere Review Laser Beam Atmospheric Propagation Modelling for Aerospace LIDAR Applications Thomas Fahey 1,2 , Maidul Islam 1,2, Alessandro Gardi 1,2 and Roberto Sabatini 1,2,* 1 School of Engineering, RMIT University, Melbourne, VIC 3000, Australia;
[email protected] (T.F.);
[email protected] (M.I.);
[email protected] (A.G.) 2 Food Agility CRC Ltd., 81 Broadway, Ultimo, NSW 2007, Australia * Correspondence:
[email protected] Abstract: Atmospheric effects have a significant impact on the performance of airborne and space laser systems. Traditional models used to predict propagation effects rely heavily on simplified as- sumptions of the atmospheric properties and their interactions with laser systems. In the engineering domain, these models need to be continually improved in order to develop tools that can predict laser beam propagation with high accuracy and for a wide range of practical applications such as LIDAR (light detection and ranging), free-space optical communications, remote sensing, etc. The underlying causes of laser beam attenuation in the atmosphere are examined in this paper, with a focus on the dominant linear effects: absorption, scattering, turbulence, and non-linear thermal effects such as blooming, kinetic cooling, and bleaching. These phenomena are quantitatively analyzed, highlighting the implications of the various assumptions made in current modeling approaches. Absorption and scattering, as the dominant causes of attenuation, are generally well captured in existing models and tools, but the impacts of non-linear phenomena are typically not well described as they tend to be Citation: Fahey, T.; Islam, M.; Gardi, application specific.