Measurements of atmospheric turbulence with airborne beacons by using a differential scintillation method.

By using the differential scintillation method suggested and described in this work, vibrations of unmanned aircraft vehicle platforms can be eliminated. Therefore, airborne beacons have great potential applications in turbulence measurements along an arbitrary atmospheric path. The experiment with a constant beacon shows that the retrieved results of the differential scintillation method have good consistency with the scintillation index inversion method. Additionally, a similar verification was carried out between a simulative airborne beacon and a constant beacon; the differential scintillation method indicated more consistent results than the scintillation index inversion method, and its retrieved results of different beacons were in good agreement with a correlation coefficient close to 1, reaching 0.994. In verification experiments over a slant path, the retrieved results of the differential scintillation method showed good statistical properties when an airborne beacon was measured under various weather conditions. The results indicated that the new, to the best of our knowledge, proposed differential scintillation method is a reliable and feasible technique for eliminating stability issues in the measurements of airborne beacons.