Abstract

We demonstrate how energy is redistributed and the law of conservation of energy is fulfilled when optical radiation is reflected in a turbulent atmosphere. It is found that the mean intensity of a laser beam, scattered by a point reflector or an ensemble of point reflectors in a turbulent atmosphere, increases in a strictly backward direction as compared to the intensity of the beam scattered in a homogeneous medium without turbulence—the backscatter amplification (BSA) effect—at the expense of overflow of the energy of the scattered beam from the side directions covering a huge area of several orders of magnitude exceeding the BSA effect localization area.

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