Atmospheric turbulence and wind profiles monitoring with generalized scidar

Abstract

We present a method for simultaneous measurement of the vertical distribution of the optical turbulence strength CN2(h) and wind velocity V(h) in the Earth's atmosphere, based on an analysis of spatio-temporal correlations of stellar scintillation images obtained with generalized scidar. A statistical comparison of V(h) obtained with this method and instrumented balloons supports the use of this method. The algorithm used allows for the identification of dome seeing, which can be subtracted from CN2(h), to obtain a turbulence profile free of dome contribution. Examples of simultaneous CN2(h) and V(h) monitorings are presented.