Efficient and optimal prediction of frozen flow turbulence using the complete observation history of the wavefront sensor is an important issue in adaptive optics for large ground-based telescopes. At least for the sake of error budgeting and algorithm performance, the evaluation of an accurate estimate of the optimal performance of a particular adaptive optics configuration is important. However, due to the large number of grid points, high sampling rates, and the non-rationality of the

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... nce power spectral density, the computational complexity of the optimal predictor is huge. This paper shows how a structure in the frozen flow propagation can be exploited to obtain a state-space innovation model with a particular sparsity structure. This sparsity structure enables one to efficiently compute a structured Kalman filter. By simulation it is shown that the performance can be improved and the computational complexity can be reduced in comparison with auto-regressive predictors of low order.