Astronomical Site's Characterization in the era of Extremely Large Telescopes: an overview of atmospheric turbulence monitoring for Adaptive Optics performance simulations

Authors
Gianluca
Lombardi
Date and time
30 Apr 2015 - 10:30 Europe/London
Address

Aula

Talk language
English
Slides language
English
Serie number
1
Description

In the past years, intensive Site Characterization campaigns have been performed to chose the sites for the future giant ELTs. Various atmospheric turbulence profilers with different resolution and sensed altitude ranges have been used, as well as climatological tools and satellite data analysis. Mixing long term statistics at low altitude resolution with high resolution data collected during short term campaigns allows to produce the reference profiles as input to the Adaptive Optics (AO) instrument performance estimators. In this talk I will perform a brief review of the principal and most used instruments and tools in order to give to the audience a panorama of the work and the efforts to monitor the atmospheric turbulence for astronomical purposes.