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 instrument performance estimators. In this paper I will perform a brief review of the principal and most used instruments and tools in order to give to the reader a panorama of the work and the efforts to monitor the atmospheric turbulence for astronomical purposes.

Date Published: 21 July 2014
PDF: 12 pages
Proc. SPIE 9148, Adaptive Optics Systems IV, 91481W (21 July 2014); doi: 10.1117/12.2054972

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 9148:
Adaptive Optics Systems IV
Enrico Marchetti; Laird M. Close; Jean-Pierre Véran, Editor(s)