Spatiotemporal tracking of optical speckles in turbulent atmospheric propagation

The speckle fields produced by optical beam propagation through atmospheric turbulence are typically described using ensemble-averaged intensity and coherence statistics, which obscure the speckle-level dynamics. Here, we investigate the spatiotemporal evolution of speckles generated during Gaussian beam propagation through turbulence by explicitly tracking them as discrete resolvable substructures. We quantify object-level persistence, transverse extent, and trajectories as functions of propagation distance, turbulence strength, and source-plane beam width. Under fixed detection criteria, we observe that a subset of these speckles exhibits measurable width statistics and persistence distributions whose form depends on turbulence strength and source-plane beam size. This object-level framework remains well-defined within the regime of strong turbulence and provides a complementary approach to characterizing turbulent propagation beyond conventional ensemble-averaged metrics.