Ship-board multi-sensor wind profiles from NEAQS 2004: Radar Wind Profiler, High Resolution Doppler Lidar, GPS Rawinsonde

During the summer of 2004 a unique set of instrumentation was deployed on board the NOAA research vessel Ronald H. Brown (RHB) as part of the New England Air Quality Study (NEAQS). NEAQS is a regional portion of the International Consortium for Atmospheric Research on Transport and Transformation (ICARTT) planned by groups in North America and Europe to develop a better understanding of the factors that shape air quality in their respective regions and the remote North Atlantic. The Ronald H. Brown was only one of a number of platforms, including land sites and aircraft, tasked with monitoring the emissions of aerosol and ozone precursors and the atmosphere in which they reside.

This paper will discuss three primary sensors, two remote sensors and one in-situ sensor, used to measure wind profiles. Rawinsondes using Global Positioning System (GPS) wind tracking were launched 4-6 times daily providing a detailed profile of winds. A radar wind profiler (RWP) permanently deployed on the ship and corrected in real-time for ship motion, provided continuous hourly profiles at 60 and 100-m vertical resolutions. A High Resolution Doppler LIDAR (HRDL) with a 30-m along-beam resolution was operated during the experiment by NOAA's Environmental Technology Laboratory (ETL). Each instrument has its own pros and cons. This paper will compare the various methods and the unique opportunity of combining all the data into a single profile that is a much more useful representation of the winds.

Initial results show that the rawinsonde, RWP and HDRL data compare very well. Limitations with the minimum range of the RWP and possible sea- clutter contamination in the lower 0.5 km can be overcome by using the HDRL to fill in the lowest levels. In a like fashion, limited height coverage by HRDL can be compensated for by the RWP. Both the RWP and HDRL provided continuous wind profiles while the rawinsonde provides full thermodynamic and wind atmospheric profiles.