Optical turbulence forecast for the European Solar Telescope (EST): the challenge of the day-time regime

TL;DR

This paper explores the feasibility of implementing an automatic optical turbulence forecasting system for the European Solar Telescope, extending night-time methodologies to daytime conditions at Canary Islands observatories.

Contribution

It presents preliminary results on adapting optical turbulence forecast methods for daytime use at ORM and Teide, supporting EST site selection and operational planning.

Findings

ORM and Teide sites have similar daytime optical turbulence characteristics.

The study extends night-time forecast methods to daytime conditions.

Preliminary results support the feasibility of daytime optical turbulence forecasting.

Abstract

In this contribution we present preliminary results of a study applied to the Observatories of Roque de Los Muchachos (La Palma) and Teide (Tenerife) in Canary Islands aiming to investigate the possibility to implement an automatic system for the optical turbulence forecasting for the European Solar Telescope (EST) telescope. The study has been carried out in the context of the SOLARNET project and the two mentioned sites were the pre-selected sites for EST. This analysis aimed to investigate the possibility to extend the methodology of the forecast of the optical turbulence developed by our team and performed on top-class ground-based telescopes dedicated to night time observations such as ALTA (@ LBT) and FATE (@ VLT) to the day-time regime. As an ancillary output our very preliminary analysis concludes, that the two sites of Roque de Los Muchachos Observatory (ORM) and Teide Observatory (TO) show comparable characteristics during the day time. Considering that the site of EST has been already identified to be at ORM this can be considered a very useful information from a scientific point of view.