Intercomparisons of Tropospheric Wind Velocities Measured by Multi-Frequency Wind Profilers and Rawinsonde

Abstract

Concurrent measurements of three-dimensional wind velocities made with three co-located wind profilers operated at frequencies of 52 MHz, 449 MHz, and 1.29 GHz for the period 12–16 September 2017 are compared for the first time in this study. The velocity–azimuth display (VAD) method is employed to estimate the wind velocities. The result shows that, in the absence of precipitation, the root mean square difference (RMSD) in the horizontal wind speed velocities U and wind directions D between different pairs of wind profilers are, respectively, in the range of 0.94–0.99 ms−1 and 7.7–8.3°, and those of zonal wind component u and meridional wind component v are in the respective ranges of 0.91–1.02 ms−1 and 1.1–1.24 ms−1. However, the RMSDs between wind profilers and rawinsonde are in the range of 2.89–3.26 ms−1 for horizontal wind speed velocity and 11.17–14.48° for the wind direction, which are around 2–3 factors greater than those between the wind profilers on average. In addition to the RMSDs, MDs between wind profilers and radiosonde are around one order of magnitude larger than those between wind profilers. These results show that the RMSDs, MDs, and Stdds between radars are highly consistent with each other, and they are much smaller than those between radar and rawinsonde. This therefore suggests that the wind profiler-measured horizontal wind velocities are much more reliable, precise, and accurate than the rawinsonde measurement.