Spread and wander of a laser beam propagating through anisotropic turbulence

In applications where a laser beam is propagated at high altitude or through layered zones of the atmosphere, there is a chance that atmospheric turbulence cells are not isotropic. In this paper we analytically describe how the spread of a laser beam is affected by anisotropic eddies of optical turbulence. We show that anisotropic turbulence is responsible for an elliptical beam spread and beam wander over the planes x-y, orthogonal to the direction of propagation z.