Nowcasting Astronomical Seeing: Towards an Operational Approach

InMurtagh and Sarazin (1993), the ability to regress seeing on a set of near-ground meteorological variables was assessed. The present article proceeds towards the following operational framework: we obtain median seeing estimates for the night, given knowledge of ambient ground meteorological conditions. The data used are extensive meteorological and seeing measurements made at European Southern Observatory sites in Chile over the years 1989–1993. In addition we used radiosonde data, to monitor effects on seeing at higher altitudes, but did not thereby obtain improved results. Seeing nowcasts are based on a novel, fuzzy analysis approach. Our tests show that we successfully nowcast good seeing in around 70%-80% of the cases in which this is possible.