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The Effect of a Meteorological Tower on its Top-Mounted Anemometer

2007

Paper published in Applied Energy.

D. Perrin, N. McMahon, L. J. Crane, M. Crane, H. J. Ruskin and B. Hurley.

Appl Energ. 84 (4) (2007) 413-424

Preprint

Abstract: The wind-speed at a site can be measured by installing anemometers on top of meteorological (met) towers. In addition to other sources of error, accelerated airflow, or speed-up, around the top of met towers can cause incorrect anemometer measurements. We consider a particular example where an anemometer was located only 2 tower diameters above the met tower. Using a standard computational fluid dynamics package, we found the maximum error for this configuration to be 2% of the wind-speed. We conclude that a top-mounted anemometer should be located at the windward side of its met tower, raised 5 diameters above the top. This will reduce speed-up error to less than 1%.

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