 Cloud height, wind speed and direction at cloud height play an important role in air safety. This paper presents a low-cost system based on digital consumer cameras to estimate cloud base height. It is shown that both wind speed and direction at cloud level can also be obtained with this system. The method is based on triangulation and uses image registration to identify common cloud features...

This paper describes a new method for harvesting maximum electrical energy in wind farms. In proposing technique, the stochastic process principles are applied for detecting fault measurements of sensors. On the other hand, the wind farm is modeled by using fuzzy concept. Thereby the turbines are controlled against continuous changes in speed, direction and eddy currents of the blowing wind. To...

Natural wind is stochastic, being characterized by its speed and direction which change randomly and frequently. Because of the certain lag in control systems and the yaw body itself, wind turbines cannot be accurately aligned toward the wind direction when the wind speed and wind direction change frequently. Thus, wind turbines often suffer from a series of engineering issues during operation,...

The prediction of wind direction is a prerequisite for the intelligent and efficient operation of wind turbines. This is a complex task, due to the intermittent behaviour of wind, its non-Gaussian and nonlinear nature, and the coupling between the wind speed and direction. To provide improved wind direction forecasting, we propose a nonlinear model with augmented information from an additional ...

Background Albatrosses and other large seabirds use dynamic soaring to gain sufficient energy from the wind to travel large distances rapidly and with little apparent effort. The recent development of miniature bird-borne tracking devices now makes it possible to explore the physical and biological implications of this means of locomotion in detail. Here we use GPS tracking and concurrent reana...

What are the effects of snow fence variables on wind patterns, and geometry and volume of snow collected in drifts? This question arose from a need to capture winter’s blowing snow to improve water supply during a drought and to protect critical areas from blowing snow. Last year, during the first phase of this project, various powders were tested to find which would closely replicate snow in a...

Doppler lidars are frequently operated in a mode referred to as arc scans, wherein the lidar beam scans across a sector with a fixed elevation angle and the resulting measurements are used to derive an estimate of the nminute horizontal mean wind velocity (speed and direction). Previous studies have shown that the uncertainty in the measured wind speed originates from turbulent wind fluctuation...