5 ms·

I do windsurfing, and wind prediction is absolutely horrible, especially in the areas with complex terrain. I understand why it's hard, it's a 3-dimensional pro

I do windsurfing, and wind prediction is absolutely horrible, especially in the areas with complex terrain. I understand why it's hard, it's a 3-dimensional problem, and pretty much all weather stations are sitting on the surface, and the wind ones are quite sparse. We need 10x-100x more stations/sensors for the data to be good. I've been thinking of ways to create a cheap solution for a simple weather station that would ping the data once a minute to the central server over something like GSM, but I'm more of a software guy. Determining wind strength/direction is not that hard, but making it all weather proof is.

xapata 10y ago
Balloons. The trick is to make them so cheap they're disposable. Preferably bio degradable, though that'd be tough for the electronics. Weather proof is impossible.
- amelius 10y ago
  Or attach them to large cargo ships?
  - froindt 10y ago
    That would get us data for areas where almost no humans are nearby. Not too valuable.
    - angry_octet 10y ago
      Wrong! We want data from offshore so we can model what happens when the system moves over land. Also, shipping is valuable and has humans who can drown.
brandmeyer 10y ago
There is a startup that has designed an ultrasonic wind field sensor that can make many measurements of the wind field above the instrument. The instrument is on a smallish trailer, towed by a pickup to the test site. Once there, it can take measurements of the wind field up to 200m or so above the trailer. The idea is to make a cheaper replacement to the met towers that wind turbine site surveys use today. Its much more expensive than a ground-level mechanical anemometer, but also much less expensive than a tower with an anemometer.
- Helmet 10y ago
  Which start-up?
  - brandmeyer 10y ago
    My information was out of date. The startup was Second Wind. They have since been bought by Vaisala, and their product currently ships under the Triton name.
- mturmon 10y ago
  AFAIK, there are not that many large-scale operational retrievals of wind velocity by remote methods. The ultrasound technique you mention for remote retrieval (which was news to me) is apparently based on this kind of rig: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SODAR https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SODAR Ocean surface winds are retrieved on vast scales by satellite measurements, due to their effect on the surface roughness, which is measured by radar (e.g., https://manati.star.nesdis.noaa.gov/products.php https://manati.star.nesdis.noaa.gov/products.php). But that's an exceptional case.
bdamm 10y ago
Aviation is all over this. Most airports have an Internet-connected weather station reporting wind speed, wind direction, temperature, and even dewpoint (which is a measurable quantity). This raw data is fairly high quality, publicly available in a standard format, and fed into weather processing systems. Another data source that comes from aviation is airplanes. Especially airliners, because the airline companies really want to avoid areas of strong turbulence. So they mandate their pilots to make pilot reports of wind speed, temperature, turbulence, to air traffic controllers who in turn make it available to weather forecasters (it is a data point, again standard format and reasonably well trained reporters makes for overall pretty good quality data.) There's a huge community already feeding data into weather underground. I am not sure if NOAA uses weather underground data, but I suspect they do not because the quality of the data is not very reliable (station mount, model, terrain in the immediate vicinity of the station, etc.) Weather balloons and satellites fill in most of the rest of the data sources. All weather models are 3D. Terrain is a major factor in weather. The weather forecast is usually pretty good in the time window of the next 24 hours around very specific places, such as the TAF report for major airports, which covers the 2 miles around the airport, and resolving weather to within a 2 hour time frame. Of course, you likely won't be windsurfing there, and I suspect you want a higher resolution weather, such as to within 1/4 mile, with 30 minutes event bracket, and 7 days out. Wouldn't we all!
- olegkikin 10y ago
  1) You're confusing temperature prediction (which is indeed not bad, and is what most people want) with wind prediction. 2) Yes, the models are 3D, but the data is 2D and is sparse. I'm fully aware of the airport wind data, and it's not even close to being enough, because the number of airports itself is very limited, especially outside of the US.
  - bdamm 10y ago
    No, wind prediction is a major part of weather forecasts, and are particularly critical for aviation. I don't think I missed your question here. You seemed to want to get raw data... and I wanted to make sure you knew that there is already a community (weather underground.)
patall 10y ago
Could not every wind turbine be a wind sensor? Sure, they are not distributed evenly but at least here in europe pretty much all wind rich areas are full of them so they could provide some data that obviously is available as they have to be managed centrally somehow.
angry_octet 10y ago
Airports where wind is especially problematic (eg HKG) use special radars to look at the turbulence. Some research on running a local high res model with radar used for initialisation, but the short timescales make it difficult. http://www.atrad.com.au/products/wind-profilers/boundary-layer-bl/ http://www.atrad.com.au/products/wind-profilers/boundary-lay... Also, SODAR: http://www.vaisala.com/en/energy/Weather-Measurement/Remote-Sensing-Systems/Pages/Triton.aspx http://www.vaisala.com/en/energy/Weather-Measurement/Remote-...

xapata 10y ago

Balloons. The trick is to make them so cheap they're disposable. Preferably bio degradable, though that'd be tough for the electronics. Weather proof is impossible.

amelius 10y ago
Or attach them to large cargo ships?
- froindt 10y ago
  That would get us data for areas where almost no humans are nearby. Not too valuable.
  - angry_octet 10y ago
    Wrong! We want data from offshore so we can model what happens when the system moves over land. Also, shipping is valuable and has humans who can drown.

brandmeyer 10y ago

There is a startup that has designed an ultrasonic wind field sensor that can make many measurements of the wind field above the instrument. The instrument is on a smallish trailer, towed by a pickup to the test site. Once there, it can take measurements of the wind field up to 200m or so above the trailer. The idea is to make a cheaper replacement to the met towers that wind turbine site surveys use today. Its much more expensive than a ground-level mechanical anemometer, but also much less expensive than a tower with an anemometer.

Helmet 10y ago
Which start-up?
- brandmeyer 10y ago
  My information was out of date. The startup was Second Wind. They have since been bought by Vaisala, and their product currently ships under the Triton name.
mturmon 10y ago
AFAIK, there are not that many large-scale operational retrievals of wind velocity by remote methods. The ultrasound technique you mention for remote retrieval (which was news to me) is apparently based on this kind of rig: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SODAR https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SODAR Ocean surface winds are retrieved on vast scales by satellite measurements, due to their effect on the surface roughness, which is measured by radar (e.g., https://manati.star.nesdis.noaa.gov/products.php https://manati.star.nesdis.noaa.gov/products.php). But that's an exceptional case.

bdamm 10y ago

Aviation is all over this. Most airports have an Internet-connected weather station reporting wind speed, wind direction, temperature, and even dewpoint (which is a measurable quantity). This raw data is fairly high quality, publicly available in a standard format, and fed into weather processing systems. Another data source that comes from aviation is airplanes. Especially airliners, because the airline companies really want to avoid areas of strong turbulence. So they mandate their pilots to make pilot reports of wind speed, temperature, turbulence, to air traffic controllers who in turn make it available to weather forecasters (it is a data point, again standard format and reasonably well trained reporters makes for overall pretty good quality data.) There's a huge community already feeding data into weather underground. I am not sure if NOAA uses weather underground data, but I suspect they do not because the quality of the data is not very reliable (station mount, model, terrain in the immediate vicinity of the station, etc.) Weather balloons and satellites fill in most of the rest of the data sources. All weather models are 3D. Terrain is a major factor in weather. The weather forecast is usually pretty good in the time window of the next 24 hours around very specific places, such as the TAF report for major airports, which covers the 2 miles around the airport, and resolving weather to within a 2 hour time frame. Of course, you likely won't be windsurfing there, and I suspect you want a higher resolution weather, such as to within 1/4 mile, with 30 minutes event bracket, and 7 days out. Wouldn't we all!

olegkikin 10y ago
1) You're confusing temperature prediction (which is indeed not bad, and is what most people want) with wind prediction. 2) Yes, the models are 3D, but the data is 2D and is sparse. I'm fully aware of the airport wind data, and it's not even close to being enough, because the number of airports itself is very limited, especially outside of the US.
- bdamm 10y ago
  No, wind prediction is a major part of weather forecasts, and are particularly critical for aviation. I don't think I missed your question here. You seemed to want to get raw data... and I wanted to make sure you knew that there is already a community (weather underground.)

patall 10y ago

Could not every wind turbine be a wind sensor? Sure, they are not distributed evenly but at least here in europe pretty much all wind rich areas are full of them so they could provide some data that obviously is available as they have to be managed centrally somehow.

angry_octet 10y ago

Airports where wind is especially problematic (eg HKG) use special radars to look at the turbulence. Some research on running a local high res model with radar used for initialisation, but the short timescales make it difficult. http://www.atrad.com.au/products/wind-profilers/boundary-layer-bl/ http://www.atrad.com.au/products/wind-profilers/boundary-lay... Also, SODAR: http://www.vaisala.com/en/energy/Weather-Measurement/Remote-Sensing-Systems/Pages/Triton.aspx http://www.vaisala.com/en/energy/Weather-Measurement/Remote-...