22 Weather Monitoring
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Atmosphere, Weather and Climate
Richard J. Chorley and Roger G. Barry
Paperback • 536 pages Pub date: September 2009 ISBN: 9780415465700
Online price: £31.50 (RRP: £34.99)
Engineering Simulation Software Used to Help Calibrate Meteorological Instruments on Phoenix Mars Lander
ANSYS (USA) announce that the University of Alberta used software from ANSYS to aid in interpreting weather data received from the Phoenix Mars lander. In creating a virtual environment of the planet’s unique atmospheric conditions, scientists discovered that heat and radiation from the lander itself could affect daily readings, such as atmospheric pressure, wind velocity and temperature. ANSYS®
software helped scientists interpret the data transmitted from the Phoenix to Earth — with
rapid turnaround while the mission was in progress — to identify the effects of the lander itself. The Phoenix spacecraft landed on Mars in May 2008 and, for the next five months, fed back a steady stream of data to
Earth. Well before the launch, a team of Canadian scientists at the University of Alberta helped in the development of the lander’s meteorological station (MET). MET was designed to collect measurements that would complement other data critical to the mission. Design and calibration experiments were difficult and expensive to perform, so the university turned to virtual testing with fluid dynamics software from ANSYS. While exploring the anticipated Martian environment, scientists discovered that, under certain wind conditions, heat emitted from the lander could cause a temperature sensor to show higher-than- atmospheric values. “With space missions, there is only one shot at getting it right. Any minor flaw could result in the instantaneous loss of years of preparation and hundreds of millions of dollars,” said Carlos Lange, associate professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Alberta. “Using simulation software from ANSYS, we learned that the internal heat generation and emission of radiation from the lander’s surface could increase temperature measurements. Similarly, obstacles upstream from velocity and pressure sensors could alter readings of wind magnitude and/or direction.” Therefore, Lange and his colleagues calibrated the instruments through a large parametric study. After the lander touched down on Mars, the university team used the results of such simulations to evaluate the raw mission data and find instances when these wind directions occurred. This process was key to preventing misinterpretation of the data by the Phoenix scientific team.
A Cultural History of Climate Wolfgang Behringer
Paperback • 280 pages Pub date: December 2009 ISBN: 9780745645292
Online price: £16.20 (RRP: £17.99)
New Cosine Correctors for Solar Measurement Applications
Handbook of Weather, Climate, and Water, Volumes I and II
Bradley R. Colman and Thomas D. Potter (Editor)
Hardback • 1974 pages Pub date: 2003 ISBN: 9780471450306
Online price: £213.30 (RRP: £237.00)
AVANTES (The Netherlands) is pleased to announce the introduction of two new cosine correctors for solar measurement applications. The CC-UV/VIS/NIR-8MM has an 8 mm active area and the CC-UV/VIS/NIR-5.0 is a special cosine corrector with 5° angular field of view.
Solar monitoring can be achieved using a pyranometer,
Dynamic Climatology: Basis in Mathematics
and Physics John Rayner
Paperback • 304 pages Pub date: 2000 ISBN: 9781577180166
Online price: £18.90 (RRP: £20.99)
Ion Chromatography Used to Study Climate Change in Antarctic Ice Cores
Dionex (USA) is pleased to announce that Dionex ICS-3000 instruments are being used by scientists of the Australian Antarctic Division’s glaciology department to study Antarctic ice cores impacted by the effects of climate change. The ice cores can be as long as 1200 meters with a climate history stretching back 90,000 years, and can take as long as six Antarctic summers to recover.
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Dionex ion chromatography (IC) instruments have a long history of being used in climate change studies. In the past 10 years, the Byrd Polar Research Center, Ohio State University, has relied on Dionex IC instruments and columns to study ice cores from Tibet, Kilimanjaro, Peru, and Alaska. Teams from the Department of Public Health and Environmental Analytic Chemistry at the University of Florence, Italy, and the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of Bern, Switzerland have also implemented Dionex IC instruments and columns for climate change research.
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Dionex is a global leader in the manufacturing and marketing of liquid chromatography and sample preparation systems, consumables, and software for chemical analysis. The company’s systems are used worldwide in environmental analysis and by the life sciences, chemical, petrochemical, food and beverage, power generation, and electronics industries. Our expertise in applications and instrumentation helps analytical scientists to evaluate and develop pharmaceuticals, establish environmental regulations, and produce better industrial products.
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pyrheliometer or a spectroradiometer solution from Avantes. One of the many spectroradiometer con- figurations offered by Avantes, is the Solar system which is a 4 channel system with two systems each measuring from 200-2500nm. One of the systems measures the direct sun radiation through the CC-UV/VIS/NIR-5.0 cosine corrector with a 5 degrees acceptance aperture and is normally affixed to a sun tracker system. The second spectrometer system in the Solar setup measures total radiation (flux) with a standard CC-VIS/NIR cosine corrector.
Simulation turnaround time was a concern to the team as well. During the mission, limited time and power resources were allocated daily to the operation of specific instruments. “To make decisions about the prioritisation of data collection, strategic planners sometimes required input based on the results of the simulations. So we needed to quickly simulate new cases,” Lange said. This short time-response requirement was met by employing the high-performance computing capabilities of ANSYS software, running the simulations in parallel on a cluster to achieve, at times, super-linear speedup (speedup greater than an amount proportional to the number of processors used). The efficiency of high-performance computing capabilities and multi-core hardware together enabled new simulations to be completed within the timeframe required for decision making. The overall success of the University of Alberta’s work has allowed for additional simulations to be performed to aid in the explanation of certain phenomena found in the raw data.
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IET
May/June 2010
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