Meteorological Study of AN Event of Occurrence of Optical Turbulence at the Tmt Candidate Sites

Details Meteorological Study of AN Event of Occurrence of Optical Turbulence at the Tmt Candidate Sites Meteorological Study of AN Event of Occurrence of Optical Turbulence at the Tmt Candidate Sites

Sep 2009

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2009otam.conf..216c&link_type=abstract

Optical Turbulence: Astronomy Meets Meteorology, Proceedings of the Astronomy Meets Meteorology, Proceedings of the Optical Turb

Mathematics

Logic

1

Optical Turbulence, Meteorological Simulations, Synoptic Patterns, Trajectories

Scientific paper

In the north of Chile three of the five pre-selected candidate sites to host TMT are located; namely, these were Cerro Armazones, Cerro Tolar and Cerro Tolonchar. The TMT site testing program conducted measurements of the meteorological conditions and the optical turbulence strength throughout the atmosphere (the turbulence profiles) above these sites. A peculiar case of turbulence occurrence above these sites happened during the night of August 13, 2006. We will show a study on the meteorological conditions above these sites adressing the origin of this particular turbulence behaviour.
A synoptic analysis for this night shows anticyclonic predominance (AP) and Jet Stream (JS) activity at the high levels of the atmosphere. Simulations using the MM5 mesoscale model are performed and compared to the measured meteorological site conditions. Turbulence above Tolonchar seems be associated to the Jet Stream, but the turbulence above Tolar can not clearly be associated to the synoptic conditions. Also trajectories were calculated for each site at altitude levels of the turbulence profiles. The low level trajectories for Tolar show the origin of air during this night being South-East of the central valley, following the orography. For Armazones the low level trajectories originate from North-East. The flow which affects Tolonchar is strongly influenced by the western circulation which is present at these intermediate altitudes at around 500 hPa. Simulations based on MM5 show clear signs of a local circulation for each site, but to improve the results it will be necessary to increase the spatial resolution of the models in order to trace turbulent processes, follow their evolution and investigate their relation with good and bad seeing.

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