On the precision of aero-thermal simulations for TMT: revisited

Environmental effects on the Image Quality (IQ) of the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) are estimated by aero-thermal numerical simulations. The current study constitutes an update of the ongoing effort to minimize simulation time and to make the computation tractable with available computational resources, to understand the subsequent physical and numerical limitations, and finally to develop the approach to mitigate the issues experienced. In particular, the paper describes a mesh and time-step independence study as well as the parameters that influence the slope of the Optical Path Difference (OPD) structure function and the TMT Normalized Point Source Sensitivity Image Quality metric in the context of thermal seeing.