Experiences in meteorological tower and acoustic sodar installation and operation for several complex terrain sites

ENSR Corporation has installed and operated real-time meteorological data acquisition systems at several complex terrain sites during the 1990s. The sites were designed to provide a profile of meteorological data for use with various complex terrain dispersion models (i.e., CTDMPLUS, AERMOD, and/or CALPUFF). The sites were located in the states of New York, Virginia, West Virginia, Ohio and Puerto Rico with multiple sites in New York and West Virginia. Each site included a 100-meter meteorological tower collocated with an acoustic sodar.

This paper describes operational experiences with the installation and operation of meteorological tower and sodar equipment, detailing some of the complexities and challenges of ground-based remote sensing devices (sodars), as well as intercomparisons between the meteorological tower and sodar data. Conditions associated with poor sodar data capture and poor sodar intercomparison with tower data are discussed. Procedures for minimizing sodar downtime and improving the sodar vs. tower data intercomparisons are described. The sodar and tower intercomparisons for each of the meteorological data collection systems include comparisons for wind direction, wind speed, sigma theta, and sigma W at various levels (50 to 100 meters).