Correlations of Optical Wave Phase Gradients in a Stratified Turbulent Atmosphere

The off-diagonal component of the correlation function of the phase gradients of a light wave passing through a stratified turbulent atmospheric path has been studied. In the weak scintillation regime, it has been shown that the dependence of the correlation function on the distance between points contains a characteristic maximum, the position of which can be used to determine the Rytov variance, as in the case of a homogeneous atmosphere [I. V. Kolokolov, V. V. Lebedev, and F. A. Starikov, J. Opt. Soc. Am. A 42, 1654 (2025)]. In the strong scintillation regime, with increasing Rytov variance, the calculated correlation function tends to the theoretical expression obtained under the assumption of a Gaussian envelope of the wave field, at r < r0, where r0 is the Fried parameter.