Measurements of the log-irradiance distribution of a laser wave propagated through the turbulent atmosphere

Log-irradiance fluctuations of He-Ne laser light were simultaneously measured at three different points in the receiving plane. The cumulative probability distributions of log-irradiance show excellent agreement with the Rice-Nakagami distribution in the region of weak fluctuations. The irradiance distributions strongly depend upon the locations of the observing points with respect to the center of the beam, as expected from recent theory.