Randall J. Alliss (Northrop Grumman Information Systems), Billy D. Felton (Northrop Grumman Information Systems)
Keywords: atmospheric characterization, turbulence, weather
Abstract:
Optical turbulence (OT) acts to distort light in the atmosphere, degrading imagery from astronomical or other telescopes. In addition, the quality of service of a free space optical communications link may also be impacted. Some of the degradation due to turbulence can be corrected by adaptive optics. However, the severity of optical turbulence, and thus the amount of correction required, is largely dependent upon the turbulence at the location of interest. Therefore, it is vital to understand the climatology of optical turbulence at such locations. In many cases, it is impractical and expensive to setup instrumentation to characterize the climatology of OT, particularly for OCONUS locations, so simulations become a less expensive and convenient alternative. The strength of OT is characterized by the refractive index structure function Cn2, which in turn is used to calculate atmospheric seeing parameters. While attempts have been made to characterize Cn2 using empirical models, Cn2 can be calculated more directly from Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) simulations using pressure, temperature, thermal stability, vertical wind shear, turbulent Prandtl number, and turbulence kinetic energy (TKE). In this work we use the Weather Research and Forecast (WRF) NWP model to generate Cn2 climatologies in the planetary boundary layer and free atmosphere, allowing for both point-to-point and ground-to-space seeing estimates of the Fried Coherence length (ro) and other seeing parameters. Simulations are performed using the Maui High Performance Computing Centers (MHPCC) Mana cluster. The WRF model is configured to run at 1km horizontal resolution over a domain covering several hundreds of kilometers. The vertical resolution varies from 25 meters in the boundary layer to 500 meters in the stratosphere. The model top is 20 km. We are interested in the variations in Cn2 and the Fried Coherence Length (ro). Nearly two years of simulations have been performed over various regions including the Desert Southwest and Haleakala and Mauna Kea on Hawaii. A recent improvement to our modeling over Hawaii was performed by using a more representative land usage dataset. Simulations indicate that the vast lava fields which characterize the Big Island to the shoreline have a large impact on turbulence generation. The same turbulence characteristics are also present in the simulations on the Southeastern face of H
Date of Conference: September 14-17, 2010
Track: Adaptive Optics & Imaging