Cloud attenuation time series synthesizer for earth-space links operating at optical frequencies

This paper provides a new stochastic model for the calculation of cloud attenuation time series for Earth-space links at optical frequencies. The presented methodology is based on the employment of stochastic differential equations for the generation of time series of cloud fields. More specifically, we propose a dynamic stochastic model for the evaluation of Integrated Liquid Water Content (ILWC) that reproduces the first order statistics and afterwards we calculate the attenuation due to clouds. In the Numerical Results Section we present first order statistics for the ILWC for various regions generated by the model and also some snapshots of cloud attenuation time series examples. Some useful conclusions are drawn.