Statistics of turbulence parameters at Maunakea using the multiple wavefront sensor data of RAVEN

Abstract

Prior statistical knowledge of atmospheric turbulence is essential for designing, optimizing and evaluating tomographic adaptive optics systems. We present the statistics of the vertical profiles of C^2_N and the outer scale at Maunakea estimated using a SLOpe Detection And Ranging (SLODAR) method from on-sky telemetry taken by a multi-object adaptive optics (MOAO) demonstrator, called RAVEN, on the Subaru telescope. In our SLODAR method, the profiles are estimated by fitting the theoretical autocorrelations and cross-correlations of measurements from multiple Shack–Haltmann wavefront sensors to the observed correlations via the non-linear Levenberg–Marquardt Algorithm (LMA). The analytical derivatives of the spatial phase structure function with respect to its parameters for the LMA are also developed. From a total of 12 nights in the summer season, a large ground C^2_N fraction of 54.3 per cent is found, with median estimated seeing of 0.460 arcsec. This median seeing value is below the results for Maunakea from the literature (0.6–0.7 arcsec). The average C^2_N profile is in good agreement with results from the literature, except for the ground layer. The median value of the outer scale is 25.5 m and the outer scale is larger at higher altitudes; these trends of the outer scale are consistent with findings in the literature.

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