  The science goals for ground-based large-area surveys, such as the Dark
Energy Survey, Pan-STARRS, and the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, require
calibration of broadband photometry that is stable in time and uniform over the
sky to precisions of a per cent or better. This performance will need to be
achieved with data taken over the course of many years, and often in less than
ideal conditions. This paper describes a strategy to achieve precise internal
calibration of imaging survey data taken in less than photometric conditions,
and reports results of an observational study of the techniques needed to
implement this strategy. We find that images of celestial fields used in this
case study with stellar densities of order one per arcmin-squared and taken
through cloudless skies can be calibrated with relative precision of 0.5 per
cent (reproducibility). We report measurements of spatial structure functions
of cloud absorption observed over a range of atmospheric conditions, and find
it possible to achieve photometric measurements that are reproducible to 1 per
cent in images that were taken through cloud layers that transmit as little as
25 per cent of the incident optical flux (1.5 magnitudes of extinction). We
find, however, that photometric precision below 1 per cent is impeded by the
thinnest detectable cloud layers. We comment on implications of these results
for the observing strategies of future surveys.

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics