Numerical simulations of Optical Turbulence at low and high horizontalresolution in Antarctica with a mesoscale meteorological model

Abstract

It has already been demonstrated that a mesoscale meteorological model such as Meso-NH (Lafore et al. 1998) is highly reliable in reproducing 3D maps of optical turbulence (Masciadri et al. 1999; Masciadri & Jabouille  2001; Masciadri et al. 2004). Preliminary measurements above the Antarctic Plateau have so far indicated a pretty good value for the seeing: 0.27'' (Lawrence et al. 2004 ), 0.36'' (Agabi et al. 2006) or 0.4'' (Trinquet et al. 2008) at Dome C. However some uncertainties remain. That's why our group is focusing on a detailed study of the atmospheric flow and turbulence in the internal Antarctic Plateau. Our intention is to use the Meso-NH model to do predictions of the atmospheric flow and the corresponding optical turbulence in the internal plateau. The use of this model has another huge advantage: we have access to informations inside an entire 3D volume which is not the case with observations only. Two different configurations have been used: a low horizontal resolution (with a mesh-size of 100 km) and a high horizontal resolution with the grid-nesting interactive technique (with a mesh-size of 1 km in the innermost domain centered above the area of interest). We present here the turbulence distribution reconstructed by Meso-NH for 16 nights monitored in winter time 2005, looking at the the seeing and the surface layer thickness.