A New Process for the Evaluation of Upper Winds

Abstract

The present system of evaluating upper winds by means of radar/radio tracking of pilot and radiosonde balloons is in its most general form to be considered as an overdetermined observation system. The redundancy of information in such systems may be used to improve the overall precision of measurement by applying the well-known theory of adjustment of observations. In this paper a scheme for computation is presented, not only for the case of a flat earth, but also for the case including the effect of the earth's curvature. The scheme is particularly feasible for implementation in practice by means of electronic data processing. The proposed scheme has the advantage that the numerical process also incorporates the conventional modes of operation. Apart from an adjustment procedure a simple smoothing process is described which depends on the accuracy attainable by the measuring technique. This effectuates a partial separation of the instrumental errors from real wind fluctuations. Some numerical data give an impression of the gain in accuracy and the effect of a certain amount of smoothing.