Open AccessAspects of the Correlation between Sodar and Mast Instrument Winds
Author(s) -
Stuart Bradley
Publication year - 2013
Publication title -
journal of atmospheric and oceanic technology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.774
H-Index - 124
eISSN - 1520-0426
pISSN - 0739-0572
DOI - 10.1175/jtech-d-12-00256.1
Subject(s) - sodar , anemometer , mast (botany) , terrain , turbulence , meteorology , sampling (signal processing) , scalar (mathematics) , environmental science , remote sensing , geology , atmospheric sciences , physics , mathematics , planetary boundary layer , geography , geometry , optics , mast cell , cartography , detector , immunology , biology
On a uniform terrain site, differences between a sodar and a mast-mounted cup anemometer will arise because of turbulent fluctuations and wind components being measured in different spaces, and because of the inherent difference between scalar and vector averaging. This paper develops theories for turbulence-related random fluctuations resulting from finite sampling rates and sampling from spatially distributed volumes. Coefficients of determination (R2) are predicted comparable to those obtained in practice. It is shown that more than two-thirds of the reduction in R2 arises from differences in the winds measured by mast instruments and by sodars, rather than by sodar errors: both instruments are measuring accurately, but just not in the same place or at the same time. The result is that sodars being used operationally should be able to measure winds to a root-mean-square accuracy of around 2%.