A transmission experiment has been performed over an optical path of 1.53 km at a rural test site in Meppen, Northwest Germany. Direct transmission measurements were made by a 7-wavelength transmissometer. Transmission was further estimated from the average voltage received by a BLS2000 scintillometer, and evaluated with Mie theory from in-situ aerosol measurements near the optical path. Furthermore, the transmission was modeled with MODTRAN, driven with local meteorology, visibility and the rural aerosol model. For a central wavelength of 0.88 μm, the transmissometer, the BLS200 and MODTRAN agree well. Remaining differences may be due to water transmission and continuum around 0.95 μm that is picked up by the transmissometer and not by the narrow-banded BLS2000 and MODTRAN calculations. When MODTRAN is run without an aerosol model, or when this model is driven by a “default” visibility, the overlap with the measurements is extremely poor.

Date Published: 7 October 2016
PDF: 5 pages
Proc. SPIE 9902, Fourth International Conference on Wireless and Optical Communications, 99020I (7 October 2016); doi: 10.1117/12.2262284

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 9902:
Fourth International Conference on Wireless and Optical Communications
Maode Ma, Editor(s)