Lidar-monitoring of atmospheric fluctuations for millimeter-wave astronomical observations

Ground-based millimeter-wave astronomical observations suffer from strong contamination by the emission of inhomogeneous water vapor in the Earth’s atmosphere. This emission reduces the observing efficiency and data quality even from a high-altitude, dry location such as the Atacama plateau in Chile. We propose to continuously monitor atmospheric water vapor with a co-pointing dedicated Raman lidar system. We show, with numerical simulations and proof-of-concept observations, how a synergistic use of atmospheric lidar data has the potential to substantially improve the quality of astronomical data sets.