Optical timing jitter due to atmospheric turbulence: comparison of frequency comb measurements to predictions from micrometeorological sensors

During propagation through atmospheric turbulence, variations in the refractive index of air cause fluctuations in the time-of-flight of laser light. These timing jitter fluctuations are a major noise source for precision laser ranging, optical time transfer, and long-baseline interferometry. While there exist models that estimate the turbulence-induced timing jitter power spectra using parameters obtainable from conventional micrometeorological instruments, a direct and independent comparison of these models to measured timing jitter data has not been done. Here we perform this comparison, measuring turbulence-induced optical pulse timing jitter over a horizontal, near-ground path using frequency comb lasers while independently characterizing the turbulence along the path using a suite of micrometeorological sensors. We compare the power spectra of measured optical pulse timing jitter to predictions based on the measured micrometeorological data and standard turbulence theory. To further quantitatively compare the frequency comb data to the micrometeorological measurements, we extract and compare the refractive index structure parameter, Cn2, from both systems and find agreement to within a factor of 5 for wind speed >1 m/s, and further improvement is possible as wind speed increases. These results validate the use of conventional micrometeorological instruments in predicting optical timing jitter statistics over co-located laser beam paths.