In addition to astro-meteorological parameters , such as seeing , coherence time and isoplanatic angle , the vertical profile of the Earth ’ s atmospheric turbulence strength and velocity is important for instrument design , performance validation and monitoring , and observation scheduling and management .
Here we compare these astro-meteorological parameters as well as the vertical profile itself from a forecast model based on a General Circulation Model from the European Centre for Median range Weather Forecasts and the stereo-SCIDAR , a high-sensitivity turbulence profiling instrument in regular operation at Paranal , Chile .
The model is fast to process as no spatial nesting or data manipulation is performed .
This speed enables the model to be reactive based on the most up to date forecasts .
We find that the model is statistically consistent with measurements from stereo-SCIDAR .
The correlation of the median turbulence profile from the model and the measurement is 0.98 .
We also find that the distributions of astro-meteorological parameters are consistent .
We compare contemporaneous measurements and show that the free atmosphere seeing , isoplanatic angle and coherence time have correlation values of 0.64 , 0.40 and 0.63 respectively .
We show and compare the profile sequences from a large number of trial nights .
We see that the model is able to forecast the evolution of dominating features .
In addition to smart scheduling , ensuring that the most sensitive astronomical observations are scheduled for the optimum time , this model could enable remote site characterisation using a large archive of weather forecasts and could be used to optimise the performance of wide-field AO system .