Scintillation and other turbulence effects in laser atmospheric propagation

This plenary paper was a review of the electromagnetic wave scintillation in random media, with particular reference to laser atmospheric scintillation due to turbulence. After a brief summary of different scintillation phenomena arising at different frequencies in different media, an introductory description of the atmospheric turbulence, its models and relevant parameters is presented. Recent progress toward the solution of the problem of scintillation is reported, which includes modelling by means of numerical simulations and simultaneous measurements of both laser intensity scintillation and all relevant parameters. These measurements, made by us, gave an important contribution to the description of the scintillation and of the effects of the different parameters, that should be taken into account in future theory.