Randall Alliss (Northrop Grumman Corporation)
Keywords: Adaptive Optics, Atmospherics, Turbulence, Optical Communications
Abstract:
Optical turbulence (OT) acts to distort light in the atmosphere, degrading imagery from astronomical telescopes and reducing the data quality of optical imaging and communication links. 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, so numerical 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 a multi-node linux cluster using the Intel chip architecture. The WRF model is configured to run at 1km horizontal resolution and centered on the Mauna Loa Observatory (MLO) of the Big Island. The vertical resolution varies from 25 meters in the boundary layer to 500 meters in the stratosphere. The model top is 20 km. The Mellor-Yamada-Janjic (MYJ) TKE scheme has been modified to diagnose the turbulent Prandtl number as a function of the Richardson number, following observations by Kondo and others. This modification deweights the contribution of the buoyancy term in the equation for TKE by reducing the ratio of the eddy diffusivity of heat to momentum. This is necessary particularly in the stably stratified free atmosphere where turbulence occurs in thin layers not typically resolvable by the model. The modified MYJ scheme increases the probability and strength of TKE in thermally stable conditions thereby increasing the probability of optical turbulence. Over twelve months of simulations have been generated. Results indicate realistic values of the Fried Coherence Length (ro) are obtained when compared with observations from a Differential Image Motion Monitor (DIMM) instrument. Seeing is worse during day than at night with large ros observed just after sunset and just before sunrise. Three dimensional maps indicate that the vast lava fields, which characterize the Big Island, have a large impact on turbulence generation with a large dependence on elevation. Results from this study are being used to make design decisions for adaptive optics systems. Detailed results of this study will be presented at the conference.
Date of Conference: September 9-12, 2014
Track: Atmospherics/Space Weather