Computer Simulation of Light Pulse Propagation for Communication Through Thick Clouds

This paper reports computer simulations of light pulse propagation through clouds. The amount and distribution of multipath time spreading was found to be independent of the detailed shape of the scattering function for sufficiently thick clouds. Moreover, the amount of multipath spreading for many scattering functions and cloud thicknesses can be predicted from a common set of data. Spatial spreading of the exit-spot diameter was found to saturate as a cloud of a given physical thickness became optically thicker and thicker. We observed that the propagation parameters for sufficiently thin clouds were dependent both on the cloud parameters and on the scattering function.