Prediction of overall atmospheric modulation transfer function with standard weather parameters: comparison with measurements with two imaging systems

The overall atmospheric modulation transfer function (MTF) is essentially the product of the turbulence and aerosol MTFs. Models describing meteorological dependences of both C²_n (where C_n is the refractive index structure coefficient) and the coarse aerosol size distribution have been developed previously. Here, they are used to predict the turbulence MTF, aerosol MTF, and overall atmospheric MTF according to the weather. Comparison of predictions with measurements yields very low mean squared normalized error and suggests that such prediction models can also be very useful in image restoration based on weather data at the time and general location in which the image was recorded. An interesting aspect of this work is that measurements of the aerosol MTF with different imaging instrumentation are very different, as expected from theory developed previously concerning the practical aerosol MTF actually recorded in the image. This is dependent on instrumentation parameters. This experimental verification with two different imaging systems supports the model that the `practical' aerosol MTF is very dependent on instrumentation.