Theoretical and Experimental Investigation into Turbulence Effects on the Rapid Precision Leveling System (RPLS) Dispersion Subsystem

摘要

The authors calculated and measured the effects of atmospheric turbulence on a two wavelength dispersion technique for compensating for refraction in the Rapid Precision Leveling System. They found that turbulence introduced a large amount of scatter in plots of optical angle of arrival vs. a point measurement of temperature gradient, especially under stable atmospheric conditions. They also found that low-frequency (less than the ratio of crosswind to beam diameter) fluctuations could be largely corrected using dispersion. This implies that averaging times longer than the inverse of this ratio would provide accurate measurements.