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Description
The performance of laser guide star adaptive optics (AO) systems for large optical and infrared telescopes is acted by variability of the sodium layer, located at altitudes between 80 and 120km in the upper mesosphere and lower thermosphere. The abundance and density structure of the atomic sodium found in this region is subject to local and global weather ects, planetary and gravity waves and magnetic storms, and is variable on time scales down to tens of milliseconds, a range relevant to AO. It is therefore important to characterize the structure and dynamical evolution of the sodium region on small, as well as large spatial and temporal scales. Parameters of particular importance for AO are the mean sodium altitude, sodium layer width and the temporal power spectrum of the centroid altitude. We have conducted a three-year campaign employing a high-resolution lidar system installed on the 6-m Large Zenith Telescope (LZT) located near Vancouver, Canada. During this period, 112 nights of useful data were obtained.
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