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Register a new userOptical Turbulence above the Internal Antarctic Plateau
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Elena Masciadri Dr.
Publication date
2010
fields
Physics
and research's language is
English
Authors
E. Masciadri
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The internal antarctic plateau revealed in the last years to be a site with interesting potentialities for the astronomical applications due to the extreme dryness and low temperatures, the typical high altitude of the plateau, the weak level of turbulence in the free atmosphere down to a just few tens of meters from the ground and the thin optical turbulence layer developed at the ground. The main goal of a site testing assessment above the internal antarctic plateau is to characterize the site (optical turbulence and classical meteorological parameters) and to quantify which is the gain we might obtain with respect to equivalent astronomical observations done above mid-latitude sites to support plans for future astronomical facilities. Our group is involved, since a few years, in studies related to the assessment of this site for astronomical applications that include the characterization of the meteorological parameters and optical turbulence provided by general circulation models as well as mesoscale atmospherical models and the quantification of the performances of Adaptive Optics (AO) systems. In this talk I will draw the status of art of this site assessment putting our studies in the context of the wide international site testing activity that has been done in Antarctica. I will focus on the site assessment relevant for astronomical applications to be done in the visible up to the near infrared ranges, i.e. those ranges for which the optical turbulence represents a perturbing element for the quality of the images and the AO techniques an efficient tool to correct these wavefront perturbations.
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Mesoscale model such as Meso-Nh have proven to be highly reliable in reproducing 3D maps of optical turbulence (see Refs. 1, 2, 3, 4) above mid-latitude astronomical sites. These last years ground-based astronomy has been looking towards Antarctica. Especially its summits and the Internal Continental Plateau where the optical turbulence appears to be confined in a shallow layer close to the icy surface. Preliminary measurements have so far indicated pretty good value for the seeing above 30-35 m: 0.36 (see Ref. 5) and 0.27 (see Refs. 6, 7) at Dome C. Site testing campaigns are however extremely expensive, instruments provide only local measurements and atmospheric modelling might represent a step ahead towards the search and selection of astronomical sites thanks to the possibility to reconstruct 3D Cn2 maps over a surface of several kilometers. The Antarctic Plateau represents therefore an important benchmark test to evaluate the possibility to discriminate sites on the same plateau. Our group8 has proven that the analyses from the ECMWF global model do not describe with the required accuracy the antarctic boundary and surface layer in the plateau. A better description could be obtained with a mesoscale meteorological model. In this contribution we present the progress status report of numerical simulations (including the optical turbulence - Cn2) obtained with Meso-Nh above the internal Antarctic Plateau. Among the topic attacked: the influence of different configurations of the model (low and high horizontal resolution), use of the grid-nesting interactive technique, forecasting of the optical turbulence during some winter nights.
Results of 2005-2007 campaign of measurement of the optical turbulence vertical distribution above Mt. Maidanak are presented. Measurements are performed with the MASS (Multi-Aperture Scintillation Sensor) device which is widely used in similar studies during last years at several observatories across the world. The data analysis shows that median seeing in free atmosphere (at altitudes above 0.5km) is 0.46 arcsec and median isoplanatic angle is 2.47 arcsec. Given a rather long atmospheric coherence time (about 7 ms when the seeing is good) such conditions are favorable for adaptive optics and interferometry in the visible and near-IR.
In two recent papers the mesoscale model Meso-NH, joint with the Astro-Meso-NH package, has been validated at Dome C, Antarctica, for the characterization of the optical turbulence. It has been shown that the meteorological parameters (temperature and wind speed, from which the optical turbulence depends on) as well as the Cn2 profiles above Dome C were correctly statistically reproduced. The three most important derived parameters that characterize the optical turbulence above the internal antarctic plateau: the surface layer thickness, the seeing in the free-atmosphere and in the total atmosphere showed to be in a very good agreement with observations. Validation of Cn2 has been performed using all the measurements of the optical turbulence vertical distribution obtained in winter so far. In this paper, in order to investigate the ability of the model to discriminate between different turbulence conditions for site testing, we extend the study to two other potential astronomical sites in Antarctica: Dome A and South Pole, which we expect to be characterized by different turbulence conditions. The optical turbulence has been calculated above these two sites for the same 15 nights studied for Dome C and a comparison between the three sites has been performed.
We present some statistics of turbulence monitoring at the Plateau de Calern (France), with the Generalised Differential Image Motion Monitor (GDIMM). This instrument allows to measure integrated parameters of the atmospheric turbulence, i.e. seeing, isoplanatic angle, coherence time and outer scale, with 2 minutes time resolution. It is running routinely since November 2015 and is now fully automatic. A large dataset has been collected, leading to the first statistics of turbulence above the Plateau de Calern.
Forecast of the atmospheric parameters and optical turbulence applied to the ground-based astronomy is very crucial mainly for the queue scheduling. So far, most efforts have been addressed by our group in developing algorithms for the optical turbulence (CN2) and annexed integrated astroclimatic parameters and quantifying the performances of the Astro-Meso-Nh package in reconstructing such parameters. Besides, intensive analyses on the Meso-Nh performances= in reconstructing atmospheric parameters relevant for the ground-based astronomy has been carried out. Our studies referred always to the night time regime. To extend the applications of our studies to the day time regime, we present, in this contribution, preliminary results obtained by comparing model outputs and measurements of classical atmospheric parameter relevant for the ground-based astronomy in night and day time. We chose as a test case, the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory (Canary Islands), that offers a very extended set of measurements provided by different sensors belonging to different telescopes on the same summit/Observatory. The convective regime close to the ground typical of the day time is pretty different from the stable regime characterising the night time. This study aims therefore to enlarge the domain of validity of the Astro-Meso-Nh code to new turbulence regimes and it permits to cover the total 24 hours of a day. Such an approach will permit not only an application to solar telescopes (e.g. EST) but also applications to a much extended set of scientific fields, not only in astronomical context such as satellite communications.
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