  For high contrast imaging systems, the time delay is one of the major
limiting factors for the performance of the extreme adaptive optics (AO)
sub-system and, in turn, the final contrast. The time delay is due to the
finite time needed to measure the incoming disturbance and then apply the
correction. By predicting the behavior of the atmospheric disturbance over the
time delay we can in principle achieve a better AO performance. Atmospheric
turbulence parameters which determine the wavefront phase fluctuations have
time-varying behavior. We present a stochastic model for wind speed and model
time-variant atmospheric turbulence effects using varying wind speed. We test a
low-order, data-driven predictor, the linear minimum mean square error
predictor, for a near-infrared AO system under varying conditions. Our results
show varying wind can have a significant impact on the performance of wavefront
prediction, preventing it from reaching optimal performance. The impact depends
on the strength of the wind fluctuations with the greatest loss in expected
performance being for high wind speeds.
