Michael Abercrombie, The Boeing Company; Venkata Gudimetla, AFRL Maui; Daniel Abercrombie, The Boeing Company; Roman Tillman, U.S. Space Force
Keywords: fractal, fractal analysis, atmospheric turbulence, ERCAOS
Abstract:
Current Directed Energy Directorate programs using active imaging, including that of space-based objects, and long-range laser communications are currently limited by the degree to which the physics of the atmosphere is understood. Improving the models used to describe strong atmospheric turbulence offers a means to advance these critical capabilities and to develop a deeper understanding of the physical processes driving these fluctuations.
To characterize atmospheric turbulence near the Air Force Research Laboratory’s (AFRL) Maui Space Surveillance Complex, located at 10,023 feet above sea level on Haleakala, over 400 GB of optical wavefront data collected during the Extended Range Comprehensive Atmospheric Optical Sensor (ERCAOS) campaign in April 2019 has been investigated for fractal properties. This analysis was performed using the well-known box counting algorithm and was run on Hokule’a, the Maui High Performance Computing Center’s (MHPCC) IBM POWER8 system. Additional rescaled range analysis and multifractal detrended fluctuation analysis (MF-DFA) has been performed on this data to further understand the variability of turbulence over time. This work supports previous findings that atmospheric turbulence is multifractal in nature.
Date of Conference: September 19-22, 2023
Track: Atmospherics/Space Weather