The effects of the atmosphere and oceans on optical propagation can often be the limiting performance factor in many optical system applications. The primary factors in beam degradation are absorption and scattering, large-scale refractive effects, and optical turbulence. For many applications, it is necessary to understand how these factors can be predicted and modeled. Specific environments remain difficult for beam propagation models: long horizontal propagation paths near or through the ocean surface or near the land surface can encounter large vertical gradients in turbulence intensity and in extinction. Water is generally highly absorbing over all but relatively short paths. Inhomogeneous regions such as coastal areas, mountains, or urban islands are difficult to simulate. 

High data rate directional free-space optical (FSO) communication remains an emerging technology with a number of technical challenges preventing widespread acceptance and implementation. The focusing and transmission of directed laser energy through the atmosphere, space, and air-water interfaces involves problems related to signal reception, tracking, steering, pointing, laser-beam propagation, laser speckle, rain effects, system design, and information processing. For imaging systems, atmospheric effects may lead to serious degradation of image quality, e.g., through contrast reduction, blurring and scintillation. There is a need for a description of turbulence in terms of environmental parameters, in terms of its impact on image quality, and in terms of image processing techniques to improve image quality by removing turbulence effects. The objective of this conference is to provide a forum for researchers, product engineers, and systems developers to present and discuss the latest developments in communication and imaging systems for commercial and defense applications and to stimulate interdisciplinary discussions of atmospheric turbulence and propagation phenomena and their impact on these systems. 

This year, papers are solicited for a special session on the use of (mesoscale) numerical weather prediction (NWP) codes in turbulence, aerosol, and propagation modeling. The capability of NWP codes to produce propagation predictions for inhomogeneous regions is a topic of particular interest.