Real vs digital clouds (North & South)
We need to understand the level of realism of the produced clouds.
North:
- obtain realistic cloud profiles out of several years of LIDAR data analysis (redmine issue 52593)
- create an extinction profile out of these clouds, which will serve as an input for simulations
- request simulations
- compare the obtained IRFs with IRFs produced with digital clouds
Now the last part is tricky. There is the study 'Mario Pecimotika et al JCAP06(2023)011' where IRFs for 36 different digital cloud profiles were produced. However there are 2 issues with these studies:
- identical atmospheric profiles were used for simulation & reconstruction (i.e. it was assumed perfect atmospheric calibration)
- MARS software was used for reconstruction. We neither can nor want to use MARS for our simulations, so the different reconstruction software will introduce an additional systematic error.
Therefore not sure yet whether we these simulations are useful to us, or we have to reproduce them. On the other hand, if corsika/simtel files are available, they might be useful). The subject is under discussion.
South: terra incognita...