High altitude wind velocity at Sierra Negra and San Pedro Mártir

Abstract

It has been proposed that the global circulation of the atmosphere winds at 200 mb can be used as a criteria to establish the suitability of a site for the development of adaptive optics techniques such as slow wavefront corrugation correction. By using the NOAA NCEP/NCAR Reanalysis data base we analyze the monthly average wind velocity at 200 mb for a 16 year period, for two sites in Mexico: Sierra Negra and San Pedro Mártir. We compare the results with those obtained for Mauna Kea, Paranal and La Silla, with Maidanak in Uzbekistan, and with Gamsberg in Namibia. We show that for all the sites under study there is a yearly wind speed modulation and we model that modulation. Our results show that Sierra Negra and San Pedro Mártir are comparable with the best observatory sites as Mauna Kea and are amongst the most advantageous sites to apply adaptive optics techniques.

arXiv commentAccepted for publication in PASP; 14 pages, 6 tables, 2 figures

References in corpus (1)

• Optical Seeing at Sierra Negra

Cited by in corpus (7)

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• Astroclimate at San Pedro Mártir I: 2004-2008 Seeing Statistics from the TMT Site Testing Data
• Astrophysics in 2005
• Weather at Sierra Negra: 7.3-year statistics and a new method to estimate the temporal fraction of cloud cover