The Design and Use of Sensitive Pressure-Jump Sensors to Detect Thunderstorm Gust Fronts. Part I : Pressure- Jump Detector Design

Abstract

We outline the known properties of atmospheric pressure jumps, including rise-time and pressure-amplitude statistics, and we indicate how these statistics guide the choice of pressure-jump detector components.We review design considerations and test procedures and discuss the practical constraints of inside and outside installations of such detectors. Our tentative conclusion is that a pressure switch with a threshold of 0.5mb, used with a high-pass filter with about a 3 min time constant, can detect sudden pressure increases reliably. The final choice of components and the evaluation of the sensor for thunderstorm gust-front detectionwill depend upon the accumulation of operating experience under well-defined meteorological conditions.