Near ground results of the CO-SLIDAR C2n profiler

Abstract

CO-SLIDAR jointly uses the slopes and scintillation indices from a double source recorded with a Shack-Hartmann (SH) wavefront sensor which leads to a robust C2n profile restoration. This technique coupled to a 0.35-m telescope in the mid-IR has provided horizontal C2n profiles over 2.7 km with a 300 m resolution. The SH wavefront sensor data revealed a very good fit of the spatial spectra of the phase to the Kolmogorov model, and of the scintillation distributions to the small perturbation regime as well. Quantitatively the inversion of the measurement covariances allows us to retrieve the C2n profile with small error bars and stable structure. These C distributed estimations are comparable with the averaged C2n measurements from scintillometers set in parallel.