Graduate Seminar

Scheduled Talk - September 16, 2009 - [ 12:00PM in DH 1064 ]

Toni Tullius

"Problems Associated with Remotely Sensing Wind Speed"

Abstract:
The earth’s atmosphere is a swirling ball of gas. The cause of the swirling, especially near the surface, is due to different temperatures of the air. These different air temperatures change the index of refraction for the air in the atmosphere. Thus, when light travels through this turbulent atmosphere, it limited the resolution of earthbound astronomical observations until the invention of adaptive optics. You have observed this phenomenon any time you’ve looked at a star. It is the motion of these speckles over our eyes that cause the stars to twinkle. This presentation focuses on a particular aspect of imaging through turbulence. In the early 1970s there was an experiment between a light source and a pair of photo detectors was used to represent this scenario. This observation can be used to create a poorly posed inverse problem that, if one can solve, permits one to compute the cross wind profile along the path of the light beam. In this work, a team of five graduate students look at different ways of solving the inverse problem under certain circumstances. This work was completed during the IMA workshop where a representative from Lockheed Martin provided this research topic.