Windprofilers
Wind profiling is an important activity in meteorological
and climatological research, aviation, air quality monitoring and research, and
land resource management. Airport authorities use windprofilers to detect wind
shear in the airport environment. Organizations that study air quality in urban
areas use windprofilers for urban airshed modeling. Windprofilers can also be
used in land-based tactical defense applications. Vaisala offers the LAP®
family of windprofilers to customers working with these applications and others.
Doppler radar which provides vertical profiles of horizontal wind speed and direction, and vertical wind velocity to an altitude of 3 km above ground level.
The Vaisala LAP®-8000 Mid-Tropospheric Wind Profiler operates in the 440 - 490 MHz frequency range. It is a fully customized product that is used to obtain wind profiles to approximately 8000 meters as a valuable supplement to upper-air observations in mesoscale and synoptic networks, and e.g. national border security surveillance.
Wind data gathered with Vaisala tropospheric wind profilers can be used to improve numerical weather prediction at the national level. Tropospheric wind profiler data can be used to calibrate regional weather forecasts against national weather models, in order to determine how well a national forecast model is performing.