High energy laser propagation through natural convection of air: a benchmark for validation of numerical simulation.

The study of propagation medium effects on lasers continues to be an active area of research. High energy laser (HEL) propagation through planetary atmosphere is particularly nuanced as the beam generates its own flow field and suffers from additional degrading effects. Herein, we construct experimental setups conducive to probing the physics of the laser-atmosphere interaction and generating validation datasets for high fidelity predictive software. Measured and derived parameters are presented, and predictive models are generated utilizing random forest regression.