Phenomenology of weather-driven diurnal and nocturnal optical turbulence trends

This paper explores the fundamental phenomenology of weather-driven diurnal and nocturnal optical turbulence trends. Examining long duration persistent atmospheric measurements at Townes Institute Science and Technology Experimentation Facility (TISTEF), an outdoor laser range operated by the University of Central Florida (UCF), reveals key correlations between observed meteorological quantities and optical turbulence strength. A distributed set of meteorological instruments provide information on local conditions via temperature, pressure, relative humidity, net radiation, wind anemometers, cloud ceilometer, and a sky imager. The strength of optical turbulence is captured via a boundary layer scintillometer (BLS) and the delayed tilt anisoplanatism (DELTA) sensors. The paper compares the turbulence measurements against the performance of a physical weather-driven turbulence model and a deductive machine learning (ML) based turbulence model. These models attempt to accurately capture the relationship and phenomenology between meteorological conditions and optical turbulence. Additionally, the paper discusses an instrument concept that could augment current turbulence forecasting techniques to have improved short term forecasts.