Properties of joint gaussian statistics

In this paper joint- or complex-gaussian statistics are assumed to apply to the in-phase and quadrature components of an electromagnetic wave which has propagated through a turbulent medium, and the consequences of this assumption are compared to tropospheric, ionospheric, and laboratory propagation experiments. New curves for the cumulative probability distribution of intensity and for the variance of intensity versus the variance of the logarithm of intensity are presented. Joint-gaussian statistics are shown to fit the total set of turbulence propagation results better than the log-normal, Rice-Nakagami, or Nakagami-m distributions. However, a major feature of optical observations cannot be fit by joint-gaussian statistics: the straight-line cumulative intensity distributions in the saturation regime that reflect a large probability of occurrence of high intensity spikes.