Atmospheric turbulence degrades decoding and data recovery from optically transmitted signals. For example, atmospheric turbulence can induce power coupling from the transmitted Gaussian mode to higher-order modes, resulting in significantly degraded mixing efficiency and system performance. Systems and methods are provided to generate a signal that is a conjugate of the atmospheric noise which is combined with a received data signal to ameliorate atmospheric noise. An optical pilot beam may be transmitted with an optical data beam and received by a receiver which utilizes the optical pilot beam to generate the signal that is a conjugate of the atmospheric noise.