[Laser] Atmosphere turbulence bubbles

[J. Forster]

My understanding is that what really matters is the size of the beam compared to the size
of the turbulence patch. There are two cases:

The beam is small compared to the patch...  in this case the patch acts as a wedge prism
and the beam is simply deflected. If you were looking at a star or planet through a
telescope under these conditions, it would appear to remain as a sharp point, but jump
around.

The beam is large compared to the patch... in this case the beam quality is severely
degraded. In this case, a star would appear to defocus or blur.

In most practical situations, you will have a mix of the above conditions.

Note that if the patches were uniform in size throughout the path length, their effect
would be different nearby compared to far away because the beam diverges.

As in telescope site selection, it may be worth avoiding places and times when the
atmosphere is very turbulent due to changing thermal gradients or weather fronts.

FWIW,
-John