ITC/USA 2008 Conference Proceedings / The Forty-Fourth Annual International Telemetering Conference and Technical Exhibition / October 27-30, 2008 / Town and Country Resort & Convention Center, San Diego, California / We design irregular Low-Density Parity-Check (LDPC) codes for free-space optical (FSO) channels for different transmitter-receiver link distances and analyze the error performance for different atmospheric conditions. The design considers atmospheric absorption, laser beam divergence, and random intensity fluctuations due to atmospheric turbulence. It is found that, for the same transmit power, a system using the designed codes works over much longer link distances than a system that employs regular LDPC codes. Our analysis is particularly useful for portable optical transceivers and mobile links.