Comparison of the refractive index structure constant prediction using radiosonde data to in-situ thermosonde measurements

Inter-comparisons between in-situ thermosonde measurements of atmospheric scintillations and the estimates of the models based on the radiosonde data are presented here. The thermosondes, which provide in situ measurement of optical turbulence by measuring temperature variance, give very high spatio-temporal resolution of the refractive index structure constant profiles C_n²(z) at about 7.5 m vertical height resolution. Only a few studies have been conducted to compare the scintillation estimates based on the radiosonde data and in-situ measurements using an accurate thermosonde system.