Wind profiler and RASS measurements compared with measurements from a 450-m-tall tower

Abstract

A 915-MHz boundary layer wind profiler with radio acoustic sounding system (RASS) was sited 8 km from a very tall (450 m) television transmitting tower in north-central Wisconsin during the spring, summer, and autumn of 1995. The profiler measured wind means and variances, and the RASS attachment measured virtual temperature. These quantities are compared to measurements from cup and sonic anemometers and a thermometer/ hygrometer at 396 m above ground level on the tower. The precision of hour-averaged profiler winds is better than 1 m s-1, and the precision of the RASS virtual temperature is better than 0.9 K. Corrections to the virtual temperature measured by the RASS are discussed, and a new virtual temperature retrieval method is proposed. Vertical velocity variance correlation is similar to a previous study, and the fact that bias is small indicates that the calculation method used is reliable.