KevinHJones2002 MSC

The determination of regionalised wind roses for the UK, for use with the
HARM acid depositional model.
Kevin H. Jones
2002
Statement of Originality
I declare that this dissertation represents my own work, and that where the work of others has
been used it has been duly accredited. I further declare that the length of the components of
this dissertation is 5500 words for the Research paper and 10000 words for the Technical
Report.
Kevin H. Jones
11th September 2002

Acknowledgements
Many thanks for helpful discussions and advice during the work for this dissertation are due
to:
Prof. Sarah Metcalfe
Dr. Claire Jarvis

&
Dr. Jim Nicholson
Abstract- The Hull acid rain (HARM) depositional model currently uses a single,
representative wind rose for the UK (valid for 400 metres height above ground level) to scale
the contributions from different wind directions to total deposition at any selected receptor
site. Geostrophic wind data and surface roughness have been used to develop two models that
together can estimate a 400 metre elevation wind rose at any location in the UK. The first
model uses a least-squares interpolation technique to estimate a geostrophic wind rose at a
location. The second model is an atmospheric boundary layer model based on the Ekman
spiral, which ‘downconverts’ the geostrophic wind data to provide a wind rose for 400 metres
above surface level. The consequence of this wind rose model for receptor sites in the HARM
model is that a given site will be able to make use of a local wind rose to determine deposition
contributions. Both models worked as expected, but only provided a marginal advantage over
an all UK wind rose. In addition a mean UK wind rose for the geostrophic level was
calculated covering the years 1990-96. HARM model runs conducted with this new rose
showed significant differences compared with runs using the popular Jones (1981) wind rose.
Key Words. HARM, wind rose, geostrophic, radiosonde, Ekman, Ekman-Taylor, surface
roughness, Zo, least squares, planetary boundary layer.
Copyright of this dissertation is retained by the author and The University of Edinburgh.
Ideas contained in this dissertation remain the intellectual property of the author and their
supervisors, except where explicitly otherwise referenced.
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this dissertation reproduced, transmitted in any
form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise or
stored in a retrieval system without the prior written consent of the author and The
University of Edinburgh (Department of Geography) is not permitted.
INTRODUCTION
The Hull acid rain (HARM) Lagrangian receptor depositional model (Metcalfe et al, 2001)
currently uses a single, representative wind rose for the UK (Jones, 1981, p10) (valid for 400
metres height above ground level, and for wind speeds of 5 to 10 m/s (Metcalfe, 2002, pers
comm)) to scale the contributions from different wind directions to total deposition at any
selected receptor site. HARM uses a simplified 800 metre thick atmospheric mixing/boundary
layer (Jones, 2002, p1 & 6). Other acid rain models that use the Lagrangian receptor
technique such as the original EMEP model (NEGTAP, 2001 and RGAR, 1997) and FRAME
(NEGTAP, 2001 and RGAR, 1997) also use a single wind rose. It is possible that the
representative wind rose may vary from region to region across the UK, so affecting regional
pollution deposition. This paper adopts a top-down approach to the modelling of local UK
wind roses. Local wind roses could be used by the HARM model for a particular region or
receptor site.
METHODOLOGY
The modelling technique developed in this paper uses two distinct models. A spatial model to
interpolate geostrophic wind information to locations between observation points (radiosonde
stations), and an atmospheric boundary layer model to transform the interpolated wind
information from the geostrophic level to a height in the boundary layer (400 metres above
ground level). Using radiosonde observations from several stations for the years 1990-96,
results derived from the models were compared to observations at Hemsby in East Anglia.
Hemsby has synoptic radiosonde data available for 1990-96, which have been used to
generate an observed geostrophic and 400 metre level wind rose for comparison with the
modelled ones.
The wind data object (WDO)

In order to pass the radiosonde wind data through the boundary layer model, and to enable the
spatial interpolation of wind information between radiosonde station sites this paper develops
the concept of the wind data object (WDO). The WDO is essentially a high definition wind
rose consisting of 30 wind speed bands (between just above zero and 30 m/s), and 72
direction sectors from 5 to 360 degrees clockwise from north. The WDO can be visualised as
1
an array of 72 by 30 cells, each of the 2160 cells containing a percentage value for a given
speed band and direction. Figure 1 shows the WDO resulting from seven years (1990-96) of
geostrophic radiosonde observations (represented by synoptic wind observations between
1457 and 3000 metres above sea level (see technical report)) for Hemsby.
Figure 1: Hemsby, 1457-3000m asl wind data object (WDO) for 1990-96, using 34671
synoptic observations. The 72 direction bins along the x-axis correspond to the angles 5-360
degrees in 5 degree increments (raw radiosonde angles are given to the nearest 5 degrees).
The 30 speed bands along the y-axis have widths of 1m/s, with central values of 0.5 to 29.5
m/s. The z-axis shows the percentage value in each cell.
Table 1: A seven year (1990-96) geostrophic wind rose for Hemsby, calculated for wind
observations between 1457 and 3000 m above sea level.
2
This WDO can be used to create a geostrophic wind rose for Hemsby (see table 1) in the same
format as the wind rose provided by Jones (1981) (see also Jones, 2002, p31). The four wind
speed bands in table 1 can be plotted as individual wind roses as shown in figure 2.
Comparing the wind rose given for speed band 2 (5-10m/s) in figure 2, with the
corresponding speed band from Jones (1981), it can be seen that the predominant northerly
component is missing from Hemsby data.
Figure 2: Speed bands 1 to 4 from table 1, for Hemsby 1990-96 (1457-3000m asl), plotted
as individual wind roses. (North is at the top, and the axes are annotated with percentage
values. The minus signs are a plotting artifact and should be ignored)
3
The spatial interpolation method
In order to provide a geostrophic wind rose for any point in the UK, a process of spatial
interpolation needs to be applied to the WDOs derived for the radiosonde stations. Figure 3,
shows a map of the locations of the five radiosonde stations (Camborne, Herstmonceux,
Hemsby, Hillsborough and Lerwick) used in this study. Since no a priori information was
available as to the desirable shape of trend surfaces relating to the spatial distribution of the
WDO contents, it was decided to create a spatial model for the WDOs using linear trend
surfaces (i.e. ‘Ocham’s Razor’ determined simplest surface shape was used ) . Only four of
the five stations were used in spatially interpolating the WDOs; the remaining station being
used as an independent check on the model. For each of the 2160 (72 x 30) percentage values
at the four stations a linear trend surface was constructed, using the least-squares method
described by Harbaugh (1964, p7-32). This resulted in an ensemble of 2160 least-squares
fitted linear surfaces from which a WDO could be synthesised at any location within the UK.
Linearly spatially interpolated geostrophic models were created for radiosonde stations
Camborne, Hemsby, Hillsborough and Lerwick (model #1), and stations Camborne,
Herstmonceux, Hillsborough and Lerwick (model #2). These two models can estimate a
geostrophic WDO at any position in the UK. Figure 4, shows wind roses constructed from
estimated geostrophic WDOs using model #1, for all stored wind speeds (just above zero to
30 m/s) and 12 wind sectors of 30 degrees width (following, Jones, 1981). The wind roses
shown in figure 4 demonstrate that the least-squares linear trend surface method can spatially
interpolate WDOs without any obvious artefacts being created, and also seems to show a
decrease in the westerly wind component between Camborne and Lerwick.
4
Figure 3: Location of the five synoptic radiosonde stations used to provide wind
information.
5
Figure 4: Geostrophic wind roses for each 100km O/S square, derived from ‘geostrophic
model #1’, showing 12 direction sectors for wind speeds greater than zero and less than
or equal to 30 m/s. (Figure 4, covers the same area on the ground as figure 3, and the scale
on each wind rose is 20%)
6
The boundary layer model
Once a geostrophic WDO has been created for a desired location in the UK, it is passed
through an Ekman spiral model (Ekman, 1905) to obtain a WDO modelled for 400 metres
above ground level (agl). The Ekman model used is described in Jones (2002, p39-41), and
shown conceptually in figure 5.
Figure 5: The surface roughness coupled Ekman spiral model used represent the upper
90% of the boundary layer.
The novel aspect of the modelling procedure is the way in which the WDO is ’presented’ to
the model. Each of the 2160 percentage cells contained in the geostrophic WDO is labelled
with a wind speed (0.5 to 29.5 m/s) and wind azimuth value (5 to 360 degrees). Given a
surface roughness length, z0, appropriate for the location, and an inner layer height, h, of the
7
order of say 80 metres (see Jones 2002, p8), the model uses the WDO wind speed and
azimuth label values as geostrophic wind speeds and directions. These 2160 geostrophic wind
speed values are used to obtain 2160 sets of perpendicular wind components (u’ and v’) from
which new wind speed and azimuth values are calculated. These ‘400 metre’ wind speed and
azimuth values are used to re-label the percentage cells within the WDO. This re-labelled
WDO now becomes a ‘400m agl’ WDO. The percentage values of such a 400m WDO can be
straightforwardly re-binned on the basis of wind speed and azimuth to obtain a modelled
400m wind rose with 12-sectors and 4 speed bands.
In addition to wind speed and azimuth values, important meta-data is created during the
Ekman modelling process. Such data consists of individual friction velocity, u*, eddy
viscosity, K, and planetary boundary layer (PBL) depth estimates, DE. These values are stored
in the 400m WDO and maintain their association with the individual cells, to enable
subsequent minimum, maximum and mean values to be calculated.
Figure 6, shows the set of modelled 400m agl wind roses that result from the Ekman spiral
model being applied to the observed geostrophic WDO for Hemsby shown in figure 1. The h
value used is 80 metres, and the z0 used is 0.13 metres (which is typical for the landcover
around Hemsby (Jones, 2002, p44)). Table 2, contains the modelled 400m agl wind rose data
used to create figure 6.
8
Figure 6: Speed bands 1 to 4 modelled for Hemsby at 400m agl, using h = 80m, z0 =
0.133m, plotted as individual wind roses. (The Ekman model input data was the observed
geostrophic WDO for Hemsby 1990-96, shown in figure 1. Also north is at the top, and the
axes are annotated with percentage values. The minus signs are a plotting artifact and should
be ignored)
Figures 2 and 6 clearly show that the Ekman model has caused the direction of the most
prominent wind sectors for wind speed bands 2 and 3 (5-10 m/s and 10-15 m/s) to rotate
anticlockwise from 250-280 degrees to 220-250 degrees. The mean wind speed has been
reduced from a value of 11.2 m/s for the geostrophic WDO, to a value of 8.1 m/s derived from
the modelled 400m WDO. Figure 7 shows wind speed histograms for both the observed
geostrophic Hemsby WDO, and the Ekman modelled 400m WDO.
9
Figure 7: Total wind speed histograms for all wind directions, derived from the Hemsby
1990-96 (1457-3000m asl) observed geostrophic WDO, and from the WDO for 400m agl
modelled from it using h = 80m, z0 = 0.133m.
Figure 7, demonstrates that the wind speed reduction caused by the model is most pronounced
at the higher end of the wind speed distribution, especially in the ‘tail’ of the distribution
above 15 m/s. This explains why wind speed band 4 (15 m/s upwards) in figure 6 has been so
severely attenuated compared with band 4 in figure 2. Such wind speed attenuation and
anticlockwise sector rotation are expected from the theory of the Ekman spiral (see Haltner
and Williams, 1980, p276). However, as shall be discussed in the RESULTS section the
magnitude of the rotation and attenuation shown by the model in figures 6 and 7 are
somewhat greater than that actually observed.
10
Table 2: A seven year (1990-96) Ekman modelled wind rose for Hemsby at 400m agl,
using h = 80m, z0 = 0.133m. Calculated from the Hemsby 1990-96 (1457-3000m)
observed geostrophic WDO.
11
RESULTS
THE SPATIAL LINEAR INTERPOLATION MODEL

In order to validate the ability of the least-squares linear trend surface method of spatial
interpolation to produce an estimated WDO at a given location within the UK; geostrophic
model #2 (which uses observed 1457-3000m WDOs from Camborne, Herstmonceux,
Hillsborough and Lerwick) was run to produce an estimated 1457-3000m WDO for the
52.48oN 1.68oE co-ordinates of the Hemsby station. The resulting wind roses for the four
wind speed bands (under 5 m/s, 5-10 m/s, 10-15 m/s, 15 m/s upwards) are shown in figure 8.
Figure 8: 1457-3000m asl speed bands 1 to 4, estimated for Hemsby’s location 52.48oN
1.68oE from the geostrophic least-squares model #2, plotted as individual wind roses.
(North is at the top, and the axes are annotated with percentage values. The minus signs are a
plotting artifact and should be ignored)
12
Table 3, contains the modelled 1457-3000m asl wind rose data used to create figure 8. For
comparison geostrophic model #1 (using 1457-3000m WDOs from Camborne, Hemsby,
Hillsborough and Lerwick) was used to create wind roses for the same location (52.48oN
1.68oE) which are shown in figure 9 and Table 4. The ‘goodness of fit’ statistics for the 2160
least squares linear trend surfaces used to create models #1 and #2 are shown in table 5, and
give a percentage sum of squares (Harbaugh, 1964, p32) fit of around 75% for each model
with a standard deviation of about 30%, which is a fair to good fit.
Table 3: A geostrophic (1457-3000m asl) wind rose estimated for Hemsby’s location
52.48oN 1.68oE from the geostrophic least-squares model #2.
In order to evaluate the geostrophic least squares model, comparisons must be made between
the modelled 1457-3000m wind roses shown in figures 8 and 9 and the observed 1457-3000m
wind rose shown in figure 2 (see also tables 1, 3 and 4). It can be seen that the results for
model #1 give a very close fit to the observed Hemsby wind rose. This is to be expected since
model #1 uses the Hemsby WDO as part of its input dataset. Nevertheless, this result is not
trivial in that it verifies that the least-squares technique does not in itself introduce artifactual
errors into the WDO data, and it should remembered that least-squares plane solutions are not
constrained to agree with their data points. The results for model #2 as shown in figure 8 and
table 3, show fairly good agreement with the observed Hemsby wind roses in figure 2 and
13
table 1, with the prominent 250 to 280 degree rose sector in the HARM relevant 5-10 m/s
speed band having similar values of 4.88% observed, against 4.69% for model #2. Mean wind
speeds and directions for the observed Hemsby WDO and the model #1 and #2 WDOs are
respectively, 11.2m/s and 270o, 11.2m/s and 270o, 11.0m/s and 265o, for the 1457-3000m
geostrophic level. However, in order to judge if use of the spatial least-squares linear trend
surface model is justified a quantitative comparison must be made between the differences or
‘error’ between the observed and modelled Hemsby windrose, and similar differences
between the observed Hemsby rose and observed wind roses of radiosonde stations at the
opposite periphery of the UK.
Figure 9: 1457-3000m asl speed bands 1 to 4, estimated for Hemsby’s location 52.48oN
1.68oE from the geostrophic least-squares model #1, plotted as individual wind roses.
(North is at the top, and the axes are annotated with percentage values. The minus signs are a
14
Residual modulus differences between the relevant wind roses for the 5-10m/s wind speed
band used by the HARM model, are displayed in table 6. The 5-10 m/s wind roses used as
inputs to table 6 are shown in figure 10. It is justified to use the 5-10 m/s band sectors for
comparisons at the 1457-3000m level since Jones (1981, p10) regards them as being similar to
those observed at 400 metres as required for the HARM model.
52.48oN 1.68oE from the geostrophic least-squares model #1.
15
Table 5: Least squares linear trend surface statistics resulting from the creation of
geostrophic least-squares models #1 and #2.
16
Table 6: A selection of observed and modelled wind roses for 5 to 10 m/s wind speeds,
and associated modulus differences. The wind rose information shown is for the 1457-
3000m geostrophic level, for the years 1990-96 inclusive (apart from Herstmonceux which
only has data for 1992-96).
Table 6 shows the initially disappointing result that the total percentage difference between
the modelled (model #2) and observed Hemsby wind rose (for 5-10 m/s) of 4.09%, is greater
than the percentage difference between Hemsby and the mean 5-10 m/s rose for stations other
than Hemsby, of 2.96%. Thus, the mean wind rose gives a better estimate of Hemsby’s 5-10
m/s rose taken over all sectors, than does model #2. However, for the prominent 250o-280o
rose sector, model #2 gives substantially better results than the mean (0.19% against 0.82%
difference). Model #2 gives a better result for Hemsby’s 250o-280o rose sector than the
differences between the observed 250o-280o result for Hemsby and any other station apart
from Herstmonceux. Herstmonceux is only 250 km to the SSW of Hemsby, and is being used
as the ‘surrogate’ east-coast station to replace Hemsby in model #2, so a small difference
between Herstmonceux and Hemsby for the 250o-280o sector is not surprising. Table 6, also
shows that Camborne and Lerwick show overall percentage differences substantially greater
than model #2 or the mean, indicating that meaningful differences can exist between the
geostrophic wind roses across the UK (Camborne and Lerwick are both directly exposed to
17
westerly winds, see figure 3). From table 6 it must be concluded that the case for using the
least-squares trend surface technique to model 1457-3000m wind roses instead of a mean
wind rose is marginal, and may depend on whether the pollution sources within the HARM
model take the form of ‘lumps or points’ or ‘extended objects’.
Table 7 shows the same information as table 6, but with the 5-10 m/s band wind roses
normalised to unity. The same conclusions can be drawn from table 7 as from table 6, but
with the added insight that the model #2 rose is very similar to the Herstmonceux rose for 5-
10 m/s. Thus to some extent the least-squares trend suface model is giving ‘nearest neighbour’
type results (in fact the linear interpolation properties of the model should give results slightly
better than nearest neighbour interpolation), see figure 10.
18
Table 7: A normalised to unity selection of observed and modelled wind roses for 5 to 10
m/s wind speeds, and associated modulus differences. The wind rose information shown is
for the 1457-3000m geostrophic level, for the years 1990-96 inclusive (apart from
Herstmonceux which only has data for 1992-96).
19
Figure 10: A selection of observed and modelled 1457-3000m wind roses for the 5-10 m/s
wind speed band relevant to the HARM model. The observed wind roses are valid for the
years 1990-96, apart from Herstmonceux, which is for 1992-96.
20
THE EKMAN BOUNDARY LAYER MODEL
To test the coupled Ekman spiral boundary layer model, Hemsby radiosonde measurements
between 1990-96 were used to create a reference 300-500m above ground level (agl) WDO
against which to compare 400m agl WDOs created by the Ekman model. It was necessary to
create the observed reference WDO over a 200 metre height range centred on 400m agl, in
order to get enough synoptic observations to create reliable wind roses (from experience at
least 3000 individual observations are required, which give an average of about 80
observations per wind rose sector, for 12 sectors and 4 speed bands).
Figure 11: Speed bands 1 to 4 from table 8, for Hemsby 1990-96 (300-500m agl), plotted
as individual wind roses. (North is at the top, and the axes are annotated with percentage
values. The minus signs are a plotting artifact and should be ignored)
21
Figure 11, shows wind roses for the 300-500m agl level for Hemsby, for the four speed bands,
and table 8 shows the corresponding wind rose information. The WDO used to create table 8,
was made using 5290 individual observations.
Comparing figure 11 with figure 2, which gives similar windroses for the geostrophic (1457-
3000m asl) level, it can immediately be seen that the prominent 350o-380o wind sectors in
wind speed bands two and four (5-10 m/s and 15 m/s upwards) have been ‘rotated’
anticlockwise by 30o, between the geostrophic and 300-500 m level. This turning effect
indicates that surface roughness considerations are indeed causing an anticlockwise
movement of the boundary layer winds similar to that indicated by theory (see Haltner and
Williams, 1980, p276). This contradicts the notion of Jones (1981, p10) that the geostrophic
windrose for 5-10 m/s wind speeds is functionally the same as that seen at the ‘400 m’ level
(as far as pollution modelling is concerned). Figure 12, shows a comparison of wind speed
histograms for Hemsby (1990-96), for both the 1457-3000m (geostrophic) and 300-500m
levels. Figure 12, seems to show relatively little difference between the wind speed
histograms at the two levels, with the exception that some percentage ‘energy’ appears to
have migrated from the upper and lower ‘tails’ of the distribution into the central (5-10 m/s
and 10-15 m/s) bands, during the drop to the lower level. This behaviour is consistent with
Troen and Petersen’s (1989) account of changing appearance of the Weibull wind speed
distribution with height.
1990-96 Hemsby mean wind speeds and directions are 11.5 m/s and 268o for the 1457-3000m
level, and 10.9 m/s and 254o for the 300-500m level, corresponding to a 5% overall wind
speed drop, and 14o overall anticlockwise rotation for all wind vectors. For the 5 to 10 m/s
speed bands the 1457-3000m vector mean wind direction is 269o, and for 300-500m is 272o.
This small clockwise rotation for the mean vector direction of the 5-10 m/s band between the
geostrophic and lower level is surprising, and suggests that a non-trivial relationship may
exist between the mean vector wind direction over a time period at a location, and the
direction of the predominant wind rose sector. For instance, the anticlockwise rotation for all
wind vectors is 14o, but the predominant wind sector in speed bands 2 and 4 has rotated
anticlockwise by 30o.
22
Table 8: A seven year (1990-96) 300-500m above ground level (agl) wind rose for
Hemsby, calculated from 5290 wind observations.
Figure 12: Total wind speed histograms for all wind directions, derived from the
Hemsby 1990-96 (1457-3000m asl) observed geostrophic WDO, and from the observed
WDO for 300-500m agl.
For the Hemsby radiosonde station two values of surface roughness length, z0, are appropriate
for coupled Ekman spiral modelling (see Jones, 2002, p44). A value of z0 = 0.133 metres for
when the radiosonde balloon is over land, and z0 = 0.0002 metres when it is over the sea. The
model also requires an a priori assumption of the depth of the ‘inner layer’, h, which from
23
Jones (1981) and Oke (1987) has been determined to be 80 metres (corresponding to 10% of a
representative boundary layer depth of 800m for pollution modelling (Jones, 1981)).
0.0002m, plotted as individual wind roses. (Note: the Ekman model input data was the
observed geostrophic WDO for Hemsby 1990-96, shown in figure 1. Also north is at the top,
and the axes are annotated with percentage values. The minus signs are a plotting artifact
and should be ignored)
The results of the Ekman model being run using these z0 and h values on the observed 1990-
96 Hemsby 1457-3000m asl geostrophic WDO are shown in figures 6, 7 and table 2, for z0 =
0.133 m, and figures 13, 14 and table 9, for z0 = 0.0002 m.
24
Figures 13 and 6, of Ekman modelled wind roses (using h = 80m, z0 = 0.0002m and 0.133m)
for wind speed band two (5-10 m/s) shows a similar one sector anti-clockwise rotation with
respect to the geostrophic direction as that shown by the observed 300-500m agl wind roses
(figure 11). However, the ‘percentage amplitudes’ of the speed band two rose sectors are not
well modelled, being overestimated by 30 to 90% (see tables 8, 2 and 9). The reason for this
mismatch can be seen by looking at the modelled and observed wind speed histograms shown
in figures 7, 12 and 14. The model has overestimated the wind speed drop in the upper ‘tail’
of the distribution, leading to too much ‘percentage energy’ being ‘pushed down’ into the 5-
10 m/s speed band.
Table 10, shows both observed and modelled wind speed information for Hemsby at the
geostrophic and 400m level. It shows that the Ekman modelled results for h = 80 m give
estimated mean wind speeds for 400m agl of 9.2 and 8.1 m/s (for z0 = 0.0002m and 0.133m
respectively), compared to the observed WDO value for 300-500m agl of 10.8 m/s (the 300-
500m agl value derived directly from radiosonde data is slightly greater at 10.9 m/s, since its
estimation can include wind speed values greater than 30 m/s). These modelled 400m wind
speeds have values of between 20 to 30% below the geostrophic values (11.2 m/s from WDO,
11.5 m/s from radiosonde observations), compared to the observed drop below geostrophic
speeds of around 5% for 300-500m observations at Hemsby (see table 10).
The overall mean vector wind directions for the h = 80m modelled results are 245o and 242o
(for z0 = 0.0002m and 0.133m) giving a rotation anticlockwise from geostrophic (269o) of
around 25o compared with the observed rotation of 15o. Table 10, shows that although the
Ekman models for h = 80m show the ‘correct’ behaviour for the ‘direction’ of their
predictions, the magnitudes are overestimated. The magnitudes of these over estimations are
greater with z0 = 0.133m than 0.0002m.
25
Hemsby 1990-96 (1457-3000m asl) observed geostrophic WDO, and from the WDO for
400m agl modelled from it using h = 80m, z0 = 0.0002m.
This is not surprising if we consider the geographic setting of the Hemsby station (Jones,
2002, p44). It can be seen that wind directions pertaining for the majority of the time (see
26
figures 2 and 11) will carry the radiosonde balloon over the sea before reaching the lowest
height (300m agl) at which observations are used by this study. Thus, the conclusion can be
drawn that a surface roughness best characterising the Hemsby observations is z0 = 0.0002m.
This assumption can be used to investigate the cause of the mediocre results the Ekman model
has produced using an inner layer height, h, of 80 metres.
Taking the z0 value of 0.0002 metres for the Hemsby observations as given, enables an
investigation to be made of the effect of varying the depth of the inner layer, h. Trial and error
variation of h leads to the interesting result that an h value of 35 metres, gives a mean total
planetary boundary layer (PBL) depth of 805 metres (see table 10). This PBL depth is very
close to the 800 metre value regarded by Jones (1981) and Metcalfe (2001) as being
representative for long distance pollution modelling.
27
Table 10: Measured and Ekman spiral modelled wind information for the Hemsby
radiosonde station (52.48oN 1.68oE).
Hemsby 1990-96 altitude 14 m above sea level (asl)
1457-3000m asl
mean wind speed 11.5 m/s using 35127 radiosonde observations
mean vector direction (degrees) 268
300-500m agl (ground is 14m asl)

mean wind speed 10.9 m/s 5% below geostrophic
mean vector direction (degrees) 254 using 3659 radiosonde observations
Note: WDOs cannot contain wind speed values greater than 30 m/s, hence mean wind speeds
derived from WDOs are slightly less than those derived directly from radiosonde data.
WDO wind speed for 1457-3000m asl

mean wind speed 11.2 m/s using the equivalent of 34671 observations
WDO 1457-3000m asl, for winds between 5 and 10 m/s

WDO wind speed for 300-500m agl

mean wind speed 10.8 m/s 4 to 6% below geostrophic
mean vector direction (degrees) 254 using the equivalent of 3650 observations
WDO 300-500m agl, for winds between 5 and 10 m/s

Ekman spiral modelled WDOs Model derived variables
WDO 400m model Zo = 0.133, h = 80m min friction velocity U* 0.03 m/s
mean wind speed 8.1 m/s 28 to 30% below geostrophic max friction velocity U* 1.13 m/s
mean vector direction (degrees) 242 mean friction velocity U* 0.46 m/s
WDO 400m model Zo = 0.133, h = 80m (winds between 5-10 m/s) min eddy viscosity value K 0.9 m^2/sec
mean wind speed 7.6 m/s max eddy viscosity value K 36.2 m^2/sec
mean vector direction (degrees) 246 mean eddy viscosity value K 14.7 m^2/sec
min PBL depth De 388 metres

max PBL depth De 2486 metres
mean PBL depth De 1532 metres


28
The Ekman model for h = 35m yields a corresponding mean eddy viscosity K, of 4.1 m2/sec.
This K -value along with the observed WDO geostrophic mean speed of Vg = 11.2 m/s, can
be used to generate a ‘mean Ekman’ wind velocity profile with height, for comparison with
observed wind speeds measured from radiosondes. Figure 15, shows such a comparison wind
speed profile for Hemsby.
Figure 15: Shows individually plotted Hemsby radiosonde wind speed measurements
against height (asl), for 1990-96. Also shown is a 50 metre height band ‘running mean’
wind speed (rough line), and the Ekman wind speed profile for K = 4.1 m2/sec, Vg = 11.2
m/s (smooth curve). Many of the individual radiosonde measurements have plotted on top of
each other resulting in a false impression of the importance of the sparser higher wind speed
values (see figure 12 for observed wind speed histograms at the 300-500m and 1457-3000m
levels).
Between 270 and 740 metres above sea level, figure 15 shows excellent agreement between
the observed ‘running average’ wind speed and the modelled Ekman profile. Below about
200m asl the Ekman model appears not to apply well as is discussed in the literature (Oke,
1987 and Troen and Petersen, 1989). Above about 800m the Ekman profile and observed
‘running average’ both seem to trend towards their geostrophic values.
Table 10, shows that the Ekman model for h = 35m and z0 = 0.0002m gives an excellent
match with observed values for wind speed and direction at the 400m level, apart from the
mean wind vector direction for 5-10m/s wind speed band, which shows a 12o discrepancy.
29
The observed 5% wind speed drop below geostrophic values at 400m is well predicted in this
model. Figure 16, shows the predicted 400m agl wind roses for the model with h = 35m and z0
= 0.0002m (the corresponding information is given also given in table 11). Comparison of
figures 2, 11 and 16 (windroses for geostrophic, 300-500
metres, and modelled 400 metres for Hemsby), shows that a similar half to one rose sector
anticlockwise rotation is seen in both the modelled and observed wind roses at the ‘400m
level’. The ‘percentage magnitudes’ of the two roses are also similar, as seen in tables 8 and
11, with the 4.14% value of the most prominent 221o to 250o sector in the 5-10 m/s band
observed for 300-500m, being similar to the 4.73% value given by the model. Figure 17,
shows the wind speed histogram for the h = 35m and z0 = 0.0002m model and indicates that
the grossly overestimated wind speed drops seen in the distribution ‘tail’ for h values of 80m
are no longer seen. Table 12, shows a quantitative comparison between the Ekman modelled
wind rose for 400m agl using h = 35m and z0 = 0.0002m and the observed 300-500m agl
wind rose at Hemsby.
30
observed geostrophic WDO for Hemsby 1990-96, shown in figure 1. Also north is at the top,
and the axes are annotated with percentage values. The minus signs are a plotting artifact
and should be ignored)
Hemsby 1990-96 (1457-3000m asl) observed geostrophic WDO, and from the WDO for
400m agl modelled from it using h = 35m, z0 = 0.0002m.
31
Table 12: A comparison of modulus differences for the 5-10 m/s wind speed band,
between an Ekman modelled wind rose for 400m agl (using h = 35m, Z0 = 0.0002m), and
observed wind roses for 300-500m agl and 1457-3000m asl, at Hemsby.
Wind roses for the 5 to 10 m/s wind speed band (speed band 2)
wind rose sector (degrees)
h = 35m, Zo = 0.0002m 11 to 40 41 to 70 71 to 100 101 to 130 131 to 160 161 to 190 191 to 220 221 to 250 251 to 280 281 to 310 311 to 340 341 to 10 Total %
400m model
at Hemsby (%) 1.95 1.67 1.57 1.89 1.85 2.44 3.30 4.73 4.71 3.58 3.06 2.51 33.27
real observations (%)

300-500m 3.07 2.80 2.30 2.06 2.36 2.96 3.13 4.14 3.62 2.94 2.69 3.16 35.23
1457-3000m 2.01 1.60 1.69 1.78 1.86 2.28 3.06 4.47 4.88 3.86 3.12 2.67 33.27
Modulus Differences (%)

Total % difference
model & 300-500m 1.12 1.13 0.74 0.16 0.51 0.52 0.17 0.59 1.09 0.65 0.38 0.64 7.70
model & 1457-3000m 0.06 0.07 0.12 0.12 0.02 0.16 0.23 0.26 0.17 0.27 0.05 0.16 1.70
Between actual observations (%)

300-500m & 1457-3000m 1.06 1.20 0.62 0.28 0.50 0.68 0.06 0.33 1.26 0.92 0.43 0.48 7.82
Normalised Version
Wind roses for the 5 to 10 m/s wind speed band (speed band 2)
wind rose sector (degrees)
h = 35m, Zo = 0.0002m 11 to 40 41 to 70 71 to 100 101 to 130 131 to 160 161 to 190 191 to 220 221 to 250 251 to 280 281 to 310 311 to 340 341 to 10 Total
400m model
at Hemsby 0.059 0.050 0.047 0.057 0.055 0.073 0.099 0.142 0.142 0.108 0.092 0.076 1.00
real observations
300-500m 0.087 0.079 0.065 0.058 0.067 0.084 0.089 0.118 0.103 0.083 0.076 0.090 1.00
1457-3000m 0.061 0.048 0.051 0.053 0.056 0.068 0.092 0.134 0.147 0.116 0.094 0.080 1.00
Modulus Differences
Total difference
model & 300-500m 0.029 0.029 0.018 0.001 0.012 0.011 0.010 0.025 0.039 0.024 0.016 0.014 0.228
model & 1457-3000m 0.002 0.002 0.004 0.004 0.001 0.005 0.007 0.008 0.005 0.008 0.002 0.005 0.051
Between actual observations

300-500m & 1457-3000m 0.027 0.031 0.015 0.005 0.011 0.016 0.003 0.017 0.044 0.033 0.017 0.009 0.228
Table 12, shows that overall, the model for h = 35m and z0 = 0.0002m, gives at least as good
an estimate of the observed 400m agl wind rose as using the geostrophic 1457-3000m asl
wind rose as the 400m agl estimate.
32
DISCUSSION
Two models have been produced that operating together have the potential capability to
estimate a 400 metre agl wind rose (for the 5 to 10 m/s wind speed band relevant to the
HARM model) at any location within the UK. The data inputs are geostrophic (1457-3000m)
wind roses derived from at least four radiosonde stations on the periphery of the UK, and
knowledge of the surface roughness length, z0, at the location.
For the 5 to 10 m/s wind speed band, the least-squares spatial linear interpolation model has
demonstrated its ability to estimate a geostrophic wind rose at any location within the UK, at
least as well as using the geostrophic wind rose from the nearest radiosonde station. However,
the added utility of using the spatial model instead of the mean geostrophic wind rose for the
UK, for estimating the 5-10 m/s speed band rose at the geostrophic level, has been shown to
be only marginal.
The second model, an Ekman spiral boundary layer model, coupled to surface roughness
length, z0, has shown that given a geostrophic WDO for a location within the UK, and a
reliable estimate of z0 for the area, an estimate of the 5 to 10 m/s speed band wind rose can be
made at 400 m agl. The resulting wind rose being at least as good an estimate of the 400m
rose for the 5-10 m/s speed band as using the geostrophic rose unaltered. This conclusion for
the Ekman model is only valid if the use of an inner layer height, h, of 35 metres for the
model is valid for the whole UK. The Hemsby radiosonde station results for the Ekman model
with h = 35m and z0 = 0.0002m, are encouraging, but the ‘trial and error’ manner in which the
inner layer depth, h, of 35 metres was obtained is open to the criticism of ‘curve-fitting’, or
that in modelling terms its validity for other locations other than Hemsby (although suspected)
has not yet been demonstrated. Thus, further work would needs to be carried out to see if the
h = 35m value gives similar satisfactory results at other radiosonde stations.
In the mean time, it is recommended that if one wishes to run the HARM model for a
particular site within the UK, the least-squares spatial linear interpolation model be used to
estimate the geostrophic (1457-3000m asl) wind rose for the location, and that this wind rose
be used as a surrogate for the desired 400m agl rose. This follows the opinion of Jones (1981)
33
that the geostrophic rose for 5-10 m/s wind speeds can be used at 400m, but with a wind
speed used for the pollution model (HARM in our case) of 10% below geostrophic. In order
to be consistent with Jones (1981) and the wider literature on geostrophic wind speeds
(Borresen, 1987 and Troen and Petersen, 1989, p31 & 117) the geostrophic wind speeds
should be calculated from radiosonde station winds at the 850mb pressure level (1457m
altitude in the 1976 standard atmosphere, see Jacobson, 1999) and linearly interpolated to the
site location (see Jones, 2002, p34).
For HARM model runs intended to predict annual pollution deposition for the whole UK in
the immediate future, it is suggested that the geostrophic wind rose shown in figure 18, and
table 13, be used to replace the wind rose of Jones (1981), see Jones, 2002, p31. Jones’s
(1981) wind rose has a significant northerly component in the 5-10 m/s wind speed band, that
is not seen in geostrophic wind roses derived for the 1990-96 period investigated in this study.
Unfortunately, information concerning the years for which Jones’s (1981) rose is valid is not
available, other than it probably dates from the 1960s or 1970s from a study called ‘the
MESOS program’, which Jones (1981) mentions but does not reference. It is not clear if the
northerly component seen on the Jones (1981) rose is the result of a wind climate fluctuation
for a particular time period, the use of wind data from a particular location, or a statistical
fluctuation caused by small numbers of individual observations being used to construct the
rose. The Jones (1981) wind rose has several ‘zero percentage’ sectors in the 15 m/s and over
speed band, suggesting that far less observations were used in its construction than for roses
in the current study. The new UK wind rose (figure 18, and table 13) is the result of taking the
mean WDO for 1457-3000m asl, for Camborne, Hemsby, Hillsborough and Lerwick
radiosonde stations (see figure 3) for the years 1990-96 inclusive. The mean geostrophic wind
speed measured at 850mb for these four stations from 1990-96 is 11.81 m/s, which results in a
pollution modelling wind speed of 10.63 m/s at 400m after Jones’s (1981) 10% speed
reduction is applied. The 10.63 m/s value compares well with the 10.44 m/s value currently
used in the HARM model (Nicholson, 2002, pers comm).
34
Figure 18: Mean UK geostrophic (1457-3000m asl) wind rose for the years 1990-96,
derived from radiosonde measurements at Camborne, Hemsby, Hillsborough and
Lerwick. Wind speed bands 1 to 4 (under 5 m/s, 5-10 m/s, 10-15 m/s, 15 m/s upwards)
are plotted as individual wind roses. (Note: north is at the top, and the axes are annotated
with percentage values. The minus signs are a plotting artefact and should be ignored)
Table 13: A seven year (1990-96) mean UK geostrophic, 1457-3000m above ground level
(agl) wind rose, calculated from 135966 synoptic wind speed observations at Camborne,
Hemsby, Hillsborough and Lerwick.
35
HARM model results using the new mean UK geostrophic wind rose, have been compared
with those using the Jones (1981) wind rose (Nicholson, 2002, pers comm). The results are
shown in table 14.
Table 14: HARM 11.5 annual deposition budgets in kT, using 1997 emissions and
rainfall, for the Jones (1981) and mean UK (1990-96) wind rose (Nicholson, 2002, pers
comm).
Table 14, shows that the new mean UK rose leads an increase in all types of deposition, with
the annual UK wet sulphur deposition increasing by almost 5%. The increase in wet sulphur
deposition across the UK is shown in figure 19. This map shows increased wet sulphur
deposition greater than 1 kg/ha/yr in parts of Northwest Scotland, and generally increased wet
sulphur deposition in the North of the UK. This is a consequence of the new mean UK (1990-
96) wind rose not having the large Northerly wind component present on the Jones (1981)
rose.
Since availability of synoptic radiosonde data is limited, this study was restricted to the years
1990-96. This seven year period is somewhat less than the thirty years normally used to
generate climalogical means (WMO, 1989), but it was the longest period available with
consistent data sampling. It would be desirable to compare the results of this study with
annual (12-month duration) wind roses estimated from the same raw data, at the same
radiosonde stations. This would enable the magnitude of year to year variation in the wind
roses to be compared to the geographic variations between stations.
36
Figure 19: The annual wet sulphur deposition differences between output from the
standard HARM 11.5 single-layer model with 1997 emissions and rainfall, for the Jones
(1981) wind rose and the new mean UK (1990-96) wind rose (Nicholson, 2002, pers
comm). (The differences are calculated as mean UK (1990-96) - Jones (1981), so any positive
values indicate an increase in deposition when the new mean wind rose is used.
Concentrations are in kg of S per hectare per year and the resolution is 10km.)
37
Although, this study has produced geostrophic wind roses for each radiosonde station (see
figure 10), no statistical analysis has been made of the differences between the wind roses
other than noting they look fairly similar for the 5-10 m/s wind speed band. An apparent
decrease in the prominent 250o-280o sector component of the ‘all wind speed’ wind rose is
also seen between Camborne and Lerwick, see figure 4.
It would be useful to compare the rose of Jones (1981) with the mean UK rose produced by
this study for 1990-96, see figure 18, in order to assess change of UK wind climate between
the 1970s and 1990s. However, the provenience and meta-data for the Jones (1981) is
problematic making a meaningful comparison difficult. However, it would be possible to
compare the current 1990-96 study with another time period by using data for the four
radiosonde stations which are available for 1997-2002. However this 1997-2002 data has a
somewhat different number of raw observations per year compared with the 1990-96 data (see
Jones, 2002, p18). Such a new study would be useful for the kind of HARM scenario analysis
that looks at issues of sulphur deposition change in the near future up to 2010, as described in
RGAR (1997, p119).
38
Conclusions
This paper has developed two models, which if used together can potentially predict a 400 m
agl wind rose at any location within the UK. However, tests on the wind roses estimated by
the models have shown that the case for using them in the HARM model, instead of an all UK
geostrophic wind rose, is marginal. A mean UK geostrophic wind rose (valid for 1990-96) has
been calculated, and the effect of using it in the HARM model in place of the Jones (1981)
wind rose has been shown to be significant.
39
References
Borresen, J. A., 1987. Wind atlas for the North Sea and the Norwegian Sea. Norwegian
University Press and Norwegian Meteorological Institute, Oslo, p183
Ekman, V. W., 1905. On the influence of the earth’s rotation on ocean currents.
Ark.Mat., Astron. Fys. 2, No.11
Haltner, G. J. and Williams, T. W., 1980. Numerical Prediction and Dynamic

Meteorology, second edition. John Wiley & Sons , Inc., New York, Chichester,
Brisbane, Toronto, Singapore, p477
Harbaugh, J. W., 1964. A Computer Method for Four-Variable Trend Analysis

Illustrated by a Study of Oil-Gravity Variations in Southeastern Kansas. Bulletin
171, State Geological Survey of Kansas, p58
Jacobson, M. Z., 1999. Fundamentals of Atmospheric Modeling. Cambridge University

Press, Cambridge, p635
Jones, J. A., 1981. The Estimation of Long Range Dispersion and Deposition of
Continuous Releases of Radionuclides to Atmosphere. The Third Report of a
Working Group on Atmospheric Dispersion, NRPB, Chilton, Didcot, Oxon, p25
Jones, K. H., 2002. Unpublished technical report.
Metcalfe, S. E., Whyatt, J. D., Broughton, R., Derwent, R. G., Finnegan, D., Hall, J.,
Mineter, M., O'Donoghue, M., Sutton, M. A., 2001. Developing the Hull Acid Rain
Model: its validation and implications for policy makers. Environmental Science
and Policy, 4, 25-37
NEGTAP, 2001. Transboundary Air Pollution: Acidification, Eutrophication and

Ground-Level Ozone in the UK. EPG 1/3/153, CEH, Edinburgh.
Oke, T. R., 1987. Boundary Layer Climates. Methuen, London and New York, p435
RIGAR, 1997. Acid Deposition in the United Kingdom 1992-1994. Department of the
Environment, Transport and the Regions, London, p176
Troen, I. and Petersen, E. L., 1989. European wind atlas. Roskilde, Denmark : Published
for the Commission of the European Communities, Directorate-General for Science,
Research, and Development, Brussels, Belgium by Risø National Laboratory, p656
WMO, 1989. Calculation of Monthly and Annual 30-year Standard Normals. WCDP
No. 10, WMO-TD/No.341, world Meteorological Organisation, Geneva
40
Technical Report
Table of Contents
Page Number
1. Introduction 1
2. The HARM acid rain model 1
3. The wind literature and the planetary boundary layer (PBL) 6

3.1 Techniques for calculating the wind rose at 400 metres 10
above ground level
4. The synoptic radiosonde data 13

4.1 The Radiosonde Windfinding Equipment 15
4.2 The UK radiosonde data files 15
5. The choice of radiosonde stations used 18
6. Pre-processing of the ASCII data 19

6.1 Wind Statistics from the Pre-processed Data 21
7. Wind rose creation 23

7.1 The Wind Data Object (WDO) 23
7.2 The Wind Rose plotting program 27
8. The mean UK geostrophic wind rose (1990-96) 29

8.1 HARM output comparisons for the Jones (1981) 32
and mean UK (1990-96) wind roses
9. The Spatial Least-Squares Linear Interpolation model 33

9.1 Fitting a plane by least-squares 33
9.2 Using fitted least squares planar surfaces to interpolate WDOs 35
10. The Surface Roughness Coupled Ekman Model 39

10.1 Using the WDO in the coupled Ekman model 40
10.2 Mean Ekman profiles 41
11. Surface Roughness of the UK 43
12. The Hemsby Radiosonde Station 44
13. References 46
i
Table of Figures
Figure 1: The geographical relationship between the 10 km HARM grid and the 100 km
EMEP grid (taken from Metcalfe et al, 2001).
Figure 2: Representation of the cycle of emission, transport and deposition of pollutants

(taken from Metcalfe et al, 2001).
Figure 3:An idealised flow chart of HARM’s structure, based on pseudo-code given in
Metcalfe et al, 2001.
Figure 4: The UK Upper Air Radiosonde Network of twelve stations (taken from the
BADC web-site, www.badc.rl.ac.uk/data/radiosonde/network.html ).
Figure 5: The beginning of ASCII file hemsby.199001 which shows part of the first
radiosonde ascent profile for January 1st 1990, for synoptic hour 00 (12 midnight
on the 31st December).
Figure 6: The beginning of ASCII file verthemsby9096.dat, which shows several

radiosonde ascent profiles for January 1st 1990, for synoptic hours 00, 06, 12 and
part of 18.
Figure 7: The beginning of binary file hemsbyvertwind9096.dat, which shows several

radiosonde ascent profiles up to 3000 m altitude, for January 1st and 2nd 1990.
synoptic observations.
Figure 9: The geostrophic (1457-3000m asl), 12-sector, 4-speed band wind rose for the
Lerwick radiosonde station, for the years 1990-96.
Lerwick. Wind speed bands 1 to 4 (under 5 m/s, 5-10 m/s, 10-15 m/s, 15 m/s
upwards) are plotted as individual wind roses.
Figure 11: The Jones (1981) ‘400 metre’ wind rose displayed as a series of sector plots.
Figure 12: Mean geostrophic wind speeds at the 850 mb level (1990-96), interpolated
between four radiosonde stations using a planar surface fitted by least squares.
Figure 13: Geostrophic (1457-3000m asl) wind roses for each 100km O/S square, derived
from WDOs at the four principal radiosonde stations, showing 12 direction sectors
for wind speeds greater than zero and less than or equal to 30 m/s.
Figure 14: Geostrophic wind roses for each 100km O/S square, superimposed one upon
the other, derived from WDOs at the four principal radiosonde stations, showing
12 direction sectors for wind speeds greater than zero and less than or equal to 30
m/s.
ii
Figure 15: 91 geostrophic wind speed histograms for all wind directions, derived from the
WDOs modelled for each O/S 100km grid square, using the least squares planar
model for the four principal stations.
Figure 16: A conceptual flowchart of the surface roughness coupled Ekman model.
Figure 17: A comparison of the measured geostrophic (1457-3000m asl) wind rose at
Hemsby, and the 400 m agl rose modelled for Hemsby.
Figure 18: Individually plotted Hemsby radiosonde wind speed measurements against
height (asl), for 1990-96. Also shown is a 50 metre height band ‘running mean’
wind speed (rough line), and the Ekman wind speed profile for K = 4.1 m2/sec, Vg
= 11.2 m/s (smooth curve).
Figure 19: Map of the environs of Hemsby radiosonde station, showing 1:50 000 O/S
mapping out to a distance from the station of approximately 15 km.
iii
Table of Tables
Table 1: mean wind speed and mean vector direction for the five radiosonde stations for
various altitude levels.
Table 2: Mean wind speeds and mean vector directions, derived from the WDOs for all
five radiosonde stations.
Table 3: Mean wind speeds and mean vector directions, for the 5-10 m/s wind speed band
derived from the WDOs for all five radiosonde stations.
Table 4: The geostrophic (1457-3000m asl), 12-sector, 4-speed band wind rose for the
Table 5: A seven year (1990-96) mean UK geostrophic, 1457-3000m above ground level
(agl) wind rose, calculated from 135966 synoptic wind speed observations at
Camborne, Hemsby, Hillsborough and Lerwick.
Table 6: A representative wind rose for use in long-range dispersion calculation (from
Jones, 1981, p19).
Table 7: HARM 11.5 annual deposition budgets in kT, using 1997 emissions and rainfall,
for the Jones (1981) and mean UK (1990-96) wind rose (Nicholson, 2002, pers
comm).
Table 8: Roughness length estimates, z0, for 22 UK surface meteorological stations,

derived from Troen and Petersen 1989.
iv
1. INTRODUCTION
This report describes the methods used to create wind roses from radiosonde balloon data
provided by the British Atmospheric Data Centre (BADC), using ESRI’s Arc Macro
Language (AML) and the PV-WAVE programming language produced by Visual
Numerics. Also described are two computer models written in PV-WAVE, one used to
interpolate the wind rose information spatially (horizontally within the Ordnance Survey
co-ordinate system for the UK), and the other an atmospheric boundary layer model based
on the Ekman spiral (Haltner and Williams, 1980, p274), which is used to transform
geostrophic level wind roses down to a level 400 metres above a ground surface of known
aerodynamic surface roughness. The reason for modelling a wind rose at 400 metres
elevation at any position within the UK is so it can be used as one of the inputs of the Hull
Acid Rain Model (HARM). Background information on the HARM model and Ekman
spiral model are thus also given.
2. THE HARM ACID RAIN MODEL

The HARM model is widely utilised in the UK to aid decision-makers formulate policies
for the reduction of acidifying air pollutants (Reynolds et al, 2002, p6). The current
version of the model, HARM 11.5 (Metcalfe et al, 2001), uses 10 by 10 km by 800 m high
grid cells (aligned with the UK OS grid) to represent the atmospheric boundary layer over
the UK (a total of 3064 receptor sites). Outside the OS grid area the HARM model uses a
grid made up of 100 by 100 km by 800 metre cells to represent the eastern Atlantic Ocean
and the whole of Western Europe (the same grid as used by the European Monitoring and
Evaluation programmme (EMEP) model, see Reynolds et al, 2002, p6). The relationship
of the two grids is shown in figure 1.
HARM uses a Lagrangian receptor oriented statistical approach to provide estimates of

wet and dry Chloride, Nitrogen (both oxidised and reduced) and Sulphur deposition across
the UK. Lagrangian atmospheric pollution models work by taking multiple air parcels
from the edge of the model along straight line trajectories to given receptor locations, such
that sufficient evenly spaced azimuths from the receptor are covered by the parcel
trajectories to allow air pollution pick up/change from each cell in the model. The
pollution concentrations at a given receptor are calculated by weighting the pollutant
1
quantities arriving from each direction using a wind rose for wind speeds of 5-10 m/s
(Metcalfe, 2002, pers comm), for the middle (400 metres above ground level) of an 800
metre deep mixing/boundary layer.
Figure 1: The geographical relationship between the 10 km HARM grid and the 100
km EMEP grid (taken from Metcalfe et al, 2001).
For typical HARM runs the receptor sites are at the centre of each 10 by 10 km OS grid
square across the UK and the run represents deposition over the period of a year. HARM
assumes that pollutant chemicals are mixed instantaneously throughout an 800 metre
mixing/boundary layer of constant depth and that individual air parcels remain intact for
their journey across the model.
2
Unlike most other European or UK pollution models HARM also incorporates orographic
seeder feeder type deposition enhancement in upland areas. The typical pollution transport
issues that models such as HARM try to represent are show in figure 2.
Figure 2: Representation of the cycle of emission, transport and deposition of

pollutants (taken from Metcalfe et al, 2001).
The way in which the HARM model makes use of wind rose information is of particular
relevance to this study. This is elucidated by figure 3, which shows an idealised flow chart
of HARM’s structure. Figure 3, shows that the contribution made by a given air parcel to a
receptor cell, depends on the pollution content of the parcel, the azimuth with respect to
the receptor of the parcels trajectory, and the wind rose used to provide a weighting for
each contributing azimuth at the receptor. Thus, the pollutant contribution to the receptor
cell depends on both the distribution of pollution sources on the emissions grid, and the
wind rose. The situation of the UK illustrates these two dependencies nicely with the
predominant wind direction being from the west (Jones, 1981), but with most non-UK
pollution sources being to the east in Europe (see figure 1). Thus, for a receptor location
within the UK, the westerly winds will tend to ‘cancel out’ to some extent the easterly
preponderance of pollution sources, as far as the European pollution contribution to the
receptor site is concerned. Consequently, determination of a reliable wind rose for use at
the receptor site is of crucial importance.
3
For each 10 km receptor cell in the UK
For each air parcel trajectory.
At the starting point of the air parcel trajectory

at the edge of the EMEP grid set the pollution
concentrations in the parcel to zero.
Move the air parcel one step at a time along a

straight-line trajectory towards the receptor cell.
Pick up a fraction of the pollution from the
underlying emissions grids, and mix
instantaneously through the mixing layer parcel.
Calculate the new parcel chemistry, and remove
a fraction of each pollutant using wet and dry
deposition. Then move on one step.
When the receptor is reached, weight the

pollutant concentrations in the air parcel for its
trajectory azimuth using the wind rose for 400
metres above ground level.
Combine the weighted pollution contributions

from all air parcels to provide a concentration
estimate for the receptor cell.
Repeat for each trajectory.
Repeat for each receptor cell in the UK.
Figure 3: An idealised flow chart of HARM’s structure, based on pseudo-code given

in Metcalfe et al, 2001.
4
For the UK, HARM currently uses a 12-sector wind rose for the 5-10 m/s wind speed
band, valid for 400 metres above ground level (agl), provided by Jones (1981). Other wind
roses for the UK have been tried with HARM, such as one derived at Heathrow airport,
and have resulted in HARM outputs differing significantly from those derived using
Jones’s (1981) rose ((Metcalfe, 2002, pers comm). The objective of this study is to, using
radiosonde upper air wind data from BADC, model regional 400 m agl wind roses for the
5-10 m/s wind speed band at any desired location within the UK. Such roses could then be
used in HARM model runs, and comparisons made with otherwise similar runs using
Jones’s (1981) wind rose.
5
3. THE WIND LITERATURE AND THE PLANETARY
BOUNDARY LAYER (PBL)
One of the principle sources of wind climate information for the UK is the European wind
Atlas (Troen and Petersen, 1989). The European wind Atlas is oriented towards the
concerns of wind power generation and so the atmospheric models utilised in its
compilation neglect the subtle atmospheric conditions associated with the lowest wind
speeds, resulting in considerable simplification of the models (Troen and Petersen, 1989,
p566). These simplifications result in a planetary boundary layer of about 1km total depth
with an inner or Prandtl layer where surface-layer physics apply of about 100 metres
thickness. Similarly the HARM model neglects the lowest wind speeds, utilising only the
400metre elevation wind rose information corresponding to wind speeds between 5 and 10
m/s (Metcalfe, 2002, pers comm). Jones (1981, p8-10) discusses how the variations in the
depth of the boundary layer combined with likely changes in the atmospheric stability
category, mean that for practical purposes a constant boundary layer depth of 800 m and
neutral atmospheric stability may be assumed for long-range dispersion models (> 100
km) such as HARM.
Jones (1981, p10) has the opinion that the effective wind rose for use with long-range
models should be similar to the geostrophic wind rose but with wind speeds reduced by
about ten percent. Jones introduces a representative wind rose (shown in table 6) as valid
for a height of 400 m above the UK ground surface (the middle of the 800m boundary-
layer). However, it is unclear from the description what method was used to create the
wind rose, whether it was derived from geostrophic winds, radiosonde ascents through 400
metres altitude, high tower measurements or some combination of techniques.
The 5 to 10 m/s speed band taken from the wind rose of Jones (1981) is shown as a sector
rose plot in figure 11; from which it can be seen that the two prominent wind directions
are south westerlies (5.07% of the time blowing from 221-250 degrees), and northerlies
(4.53% of the time from 341 to 10 degrees). The 5 to 10 m/s wind direction distribution
shown in figure 11 has frequently been used as the wind input for the HARM model
(Metcalfe, 2002, pers comm). It shall be shown later that similar wind roses derived from
UK radiosonde stations for 1990-96 do not show this dominant northerly component.
6
The structure of the planetary boundary layer (PBL) is described by Oke (1987, p37-41) as
consisting of four conceptual layers. The layer closest to the ground called the laminar
boundary layer is a few millimetres in thickness, consisting of only smooth laminar
airflow. Next is the roughness layer of a several centimetres to several metres thickness,
which is dominated by the effects of surface roughness elements, resulting in complex
eddy and vortex types of air motion. This layer is important in that it couples surface
roughness to the overlying layers of the atmosphere. The inner layer comes next and
occupies roughly the lower 10 percent of the entire planetary boundary layer depth. This
layer is also referred to as the Prandtl layer or constant flux layer since ‘vertical fluxes’
within it vary by less than 10 percent with height. Heat, mass and momentum transfer in
this layer are the result of turbulent diffusion and are governed by quantities called eddy
diffusivities, which are often written as K’s in atmospheric equations. For the inner layer
the K values increase with height as the size of the atmospheric eddies increase with
height, resulting in the given atmospheric property profile having a logarithmic shape.
Haltner and Williams (1980, p273), Troen and Petersen (1989, p566) and Landsberg
(1981, p137) give a logarithmic relation for wind speed, u, with height, z, above the
ground as:
u* z
u( z) = ln (1)
k z0
which is valid for neutral atmospheric stability conditions in the inner layer. z0 is the
roughness length, the height at which the mean wind should go to zero, and represents the
aerodynamic roughness of the ground surface. u* is the friction velocity and k is the von
Karman constant, usually taken as 0.40 . Stull (1988, p358 & p181) gives typical values of
u* for neutral conditions as 0.05 to 0.3 m/s, and states that experimental values of k vary
between 0.35 and 0.42, but that 0.40 is the most widely used value.
The eddy diffusivity for wind speed is called the eddy viscosity and in the inner layer for
neutral conditions is given by:
K = kzu* (2)
as given by Haltner and Williams (1980, p273). Typical K values for the inner layer vary
from 0.00001m2 s-1 for just above the surface to as high as 100 m2 s-1 at the top of the layer
7
(Oke, 1987, p40). Haltner and Williams state that equation (1) is valid for heights of up to
the order of 50 metres for neutral stability. The European wind Atlas (Troen and Petersen,
1989, p566) introduces a modified version of equation (1) for use in non-neutral
atmospheric conditions which takes thermal buoyancy forces into account by using the
similarity theory of Monin and Obukhov (Haltner and Williams, 1980, p277), and can
provide usable wind speed estimates at heights of up to 200 metres above the ground,
within the inner layer.
Above the inner layer is a turbulence dominated domain which extents upwards to the top
of the atmospheric boundary layer. This layer is termed the outer layer or Ekman layer
and typically has a depth of 90 percent of the total depth of the boundary layer (Oke, 1987,
p41). The depth of the Ekman layer can vary from as small as 100 metres on clear winter
nights, up to 1-2 km on summer days with light winds and thermal convection (Oke, 1987,
p41). As already discussed Jones (1981, p8-10) regards an assumed boundary layer
thickness of 800 metres with neutral stability as suitable for long range pollution
modelling, which will result in an inner layer depth of about 80 metres, and an Ekman
layer depth of 720 metres. In the Ekman layer the friction, pressure and Coriolis forces are
of the same order of magnitude with the consequence that wind speed and direction can be
modelled using an Ekman spiral (Ekman, 1905, Ryan, 1974, p6, Haltner and Williams,
1980, p274). The Ekman spiral can be described by the following equations taken from
Ryan (1974, p6):
u ' = V g − V g e − az cos(az ) (3a)
v ' = V g e − az sin(az ) (3b)
where a is the Ekman parameter and is given by:
a= f (3c)
2K
In equation 3c, f is the Coriolis parameter, which is dependent on latitude and is given by
Landsberg (1981, p136) as:
8
f = 2Ω sin φ (4)
where Ω is the angular velocity of the Earth (7.27 x 10-5 radians s-1) and φ is the latitude
angle. For the UK equation 4 gives f values of between 1.1 to 1.3 x 10-4s-1. K is the eddy
viscosity value for the Ekman layer which has typical values of around 5 m2 s-1 (Allison,
1992), and maximum values of less than 100 m2 s-1 (Oke, 1987, p40). The Ekman spiral
model assumes a constant K value for whole outer layer.
In equations 3a and 3b, Vg is the geostrophic wind speed, z is the height above the ground,
u’ is the wind component +ve in the same direction as the geostrophic wind, and v’ is the
wind component +ve in the direction 90 degrees to the left of the geostrophic wind (for the
Northern hemisphere).
The wind speed at a height z within the Ekman layer can be obtained from the
perpendicular components u’ and v’ using Pythagoras’s theorem as follows (Ryan, 1974,
p34):
Magnitude of resultant wind speed Vres = (u ' ) 2 + (v ' ) 2 (5)
Allison (1992) and Landsberg (1981, p137) describe how the angle α between the
geostrophic wind vector and the wind vector modelled by the constant-K Ekman spiral
varies from zero at the top of the Ekman layer to 45 degrees anti-clockwise of geostrophic
direction close to the ground (for the Northern hemisphere. Note also, that the Ekman
spiral result is not valid in the inner layer). The top of the Ekman layer is defined as when
going upwards from the surface the angle α reaches zero for the first time, with v’
reaching zero in equation 3b, and u’ asymptotically approaching the geostrophic wind
speed Vg in equation 3a. Allison (1992) gives the height of the top of the Ekman layer, DE
as:
1
DE = π (2 K f ) 2 (6)
Allison regards DE as being representative of the total depth of the atmospheric boundary
layer. Using equation 6, an eddy viscosity K -value of 4m2 s-1 will result in a total
9
boundary layer depth of approximately 800m. K –values of 50m2 s-1 and 100m2 s-1 result in
DE –values of around 3 km and 4 km respectively.
Above the atmospheric boundary layer the wind speeds are assumed to be decoupled from
the frictional effects of the ground surface and are said to be geostrophic winds, which
have the pressure-gradient and Coriolis forces in balance with each other such that the
wind flows parallel to the isobars on a pressure chart (Anthes et al, 1978, p115), with low
pressure to the left of the wind vector (for the Northern Hemisphere). The geostrophic
wind speed may be estimated from the pressure gradient calculated from meteorological
pressure charts as described by Landsberg (1981, p136). Geopotential heights derived
from pressure charts or direct radiosonde measurements of wind speed above the boundary
layer (usually measured at the 850mb pressure level (Ryan, 1977)) may also be used.
Pedder, (1981b) describes a multivariate analysis of both types of data. Troen and Petersen
(1989, p31) and Borresen (1987) show mean geostrophic wind speeds increasing from
10.4 to 12.4 ms-1 across the UK from the Kent coast to the Outer Hebrides.
3.1 Techniques for calculating the wind rose at 400 metres above ground level
The European Wind Atlas (Troen and Petersen, 1989) uses a ground-up method for
calculating the wind speeds in an inner layer of up to 200 metres depth. Troen and
Petersen (1989, p77) have for the UK used 22 surface wind stations to determine Weibull
distribution parameters for each of 12 wind rose sectors associated with each station. The
Weibull distribution is a mathematical representation of the wind speed histogram
(Weibull, 1951). In the European Wind Atlas the effects of the surface roughness
(represented by roughness length, z0) near each station have been taken into account for
each 30 degree width sector radiating from the station location, out to a distance of several
kilometres. Each 30 degree surface roughness sector corresponds to one of the 12 wind
rose sectors. The resulting tables of Weibull parameters for each wind sector represent the
wind resource for a given station location at five reference heights above the ground (10,
25, 50, 100 and 200 metres) and four reference z0 values (0.0002, 0.03, 0.10 and 0.40
metres). For the 22 UK Wind Atlas stations the mean value of surface roughness length, z0
was found to be 0.16 metres with a standard deviation of 0.12 metres (see section 11)
corresponding to farmland with a closed appearance with many trees and bushes (Troen
and Petersen, 1989, p58). The typical spacing for the UK surface wind stations used by the
Wind Atlas is between 75 and 200 km (Troen and Petersen, 1989, p38-39), and to estimate
10
the wind at a point between stations one would simply use the Weibull tables for the
closest station.
The European Wind Atlas model has a number of drawbacks for estimating a
representative wind rose at 400 metres height above ground level. Firstly the logarithmic
wind profile model used by the atlas is only valid in the inner layer, and for a
representative atmospheric boundary layer depth of 800 metres for pollution modelling
(Jones, 1981, p8-10), the 400 metre height level is in the Ekman layer. Even without the
boundary layer thickness assumptions of Jones (1981) the 400metre level will only spend
time either in the Ekman layer or above the PBL in geostrophic winds. Secondly, Jones
(1981, p10) specifically states that for long distance pollutant modelling ‘effective wind-
speed is more easily related to the geostrophic wind-speed than to wind-speed at a defined,
low height in the mixing layer’. This statement is strongly suggestive that any attempt to
calculate representative regional 400 metre level wind roses for the UK should employ a
geostrophic-down approach starting with geostrophic wind data and somehow
‘conditioning’ it with surface roughness information to obtain 400 metre level winds. Such
a geostrophic-down model can be achieved by using measurements of the geostrophic
winds taken from synoptic radiosonde stations to drive a ‘coupled’ Ekman model to obtain
a wind rose at 400 metres. One such model is the Ekman-Taylor model described by
Haltner and Williams (1980, p272-277). This is a two-layer model which links a constant-
flux inner layer with a superimposed constant-K Ekman layer for conditions of neutral
atmospheric stability. Given the geostrophic wind speed Vg, the surface roughness length
z0, and the height of the inner layer h, the model can predict the perpendicular components
of the wind vector at any height z, within the inner or Ekman layers. A drawback of this
type of model is that the depth of the inner layer h, must be specified a priori as a model
input, when it would be desirable to have it predicted as a model output. However, such a
prediction of h would require a far more sophisticated model. Problems were encountered
solving the system of non-linear equations needed to implement this model, so a simpler
approach was chosen which linked an Ekman model as given in equations 3a and 3b to
surface roughness length z0, by means of the eddy viscosity K. Haltner and Williams
(1980, p276) provide a relation that gives the value of eddy viscosity, K at the top of an
inner layer of thickness h metres in terms of the friction velocity u* :
11
K = ku* h (7)
where k is von Karman’s constant (k = 0.4). The values of K at the inner layer, Ekman
layer boundary should match, so equation 7 can be used to estimate the constant-K value
for the Ekman spiral (equations 3a and 3b). As with the Ekman-Taylor model an a priori
estimate of the h value must be made. The value of friction velocity, u* can be estimated
from the geostrophic wind speed, Vg and surface roughness length, z0 by means of the
geostrophic drag law, originally formulated for neutral stability conditions by Rossby and
Montgomery (1935) to describe the balance between the geostrophic pressure gradient
force and the frictional force due to surface roughness. Troen and Petersen (1989, p567)
give an expression of the geostraphic drag law as:
2
u u
Vg = * ln * − A + B2 (8)
k fz 0
where f is the Coriolis parameter and A and B are empirical constants which for neutral
stability have values of 1.8 and 4.5 respectively.
12
4. THE SYNOPTIC RADIOSONDE DATA
The current (2002) upper-air radiosonde network for the UK, consists of twelve stations
(BADC web-site, www.badc.rl.ac.uk/data/radiosonde/network.html). The station locations
are shown in figure 4.
Figure 4: The UK Upper Air Radiosonde Network of twelve stations (taken from the
BADC web-site, www.badc.rl.ac.uk/data/radiosonde/network.html ).
The ‘range’ stations shown in figure 4 are situated on military ranges, and perform only
irregular measurements that are not useful for the creation of wind roses, so they will not
be discussed further.
13
The ‘operational’ stations are the ones that provide the synoptic upper air observations
required by this study. These stations provide radiosonde balloon ascent atmospheric data
profiles at regular six hour intervals, at the synoptic hours of 00, 06, 12, 18 GMT (the term
synoptic merely refers to the standard times at which meteorological observations are
taken world-wide).
There have been a number of changes to the ‘operational’ station network since 1990:
• Shanwell (03170) closed on 15/3/92. Synoptic observations were transferred to

Boulmer (03240) on 16/3/92.
• Crawley (03774) closed on 30/9/92, and was replaced by Herstmonceux (03882) on

1/10/92, for synoptic observations.
• Aughton (03322) closed on 31/3/96, and the 6 hourly synoptic routine transferred to
Aberporth (03502), on the same day.
According to BADC (BADC web-site), the synoptic radiosonde stations are required to
report their observations to the UK Met Office in the form of ‘standard resolution data’
files which consist of measurements made at certain pressure levels with the atmosphere.
• Standard Pressure Levels

Data are always recorded at the ‘standard pressure levels’ on every radiosonde balloon
ascent. The standard pressure levels going upwards from the surface are 1000, 925, 850,
700, 500 and 400 mb, corresponding to altitudes of 111, 760, 1457, 3012, 5574, and 7185
metres above sea level, respectively (the altitudes are derived from the 1976 standard
atmospheric model, see Jacobson, 1999). Standard pressure levels are in fact measured all
the way up to around 30 km altitude, where the balloon will burst. However, only the
levels in the lower few kilometres of the atmosphere (i.e. the troposphere) are relevant to
this study. It should be noted that in the literature concerning geostrophic winds, which
includes Borresen, 1987 and Troen, I. and Petersen, 1989, the 850 mb pressure level is
taken to correspond to the altitude (1457m asl) where the winds become geostrophic (i.e.
are no longer frictionally coupled to the earth’s surface).
14
• Significant Pressure Levels
In addition to the ‘standard pressure levels’ other data readings are taken at intermediate
pressure levels termed ‘significant pressure levels’. Observations at these additional levels
are added so as to give a clearer picture of the measured atmospheric profile, and are
triggered by significant changes in wind speed, temperature or humidity. These
‘significant pressure level’ observations are very important to the current study in that they
provide the extra observations needed to create reliable wind roses in the 300-500 metre
above ground level (agl) height band, and also provide plentiful extra observations of wind
speed and direction for the creation of geostrophic wind roses (1457-3000m asl).
4.1 The Radiosonde Windfinding Equipment

According to BADC the UK Met Office has used the RS80 radiosonde, manufactured by
Vaisala of Sweden for the past twenty years. The atmospheric profile data used for the
current study consist of wind speed and wind direction, for a given altitude above sea level
(pressure is also noted if available). The RS80 radiosonde package can return wind speed
values to an accuracy of +/- 1 to 2 m/s, height values accurate to +/- 40 metres, and
pressure values accurate to +/- 0.5 mb. Temperature and humidity radiosonde
measurements were not used in this study, and so are not discussed.
4.2 The UK radiosonde data files

The data files containing the UK standard resolution radiosonde data, as discussed above,
are available on the BDAC web-site (www.badc.rl.ac.uk) in the subdirectory:
/badc/ukmo-rad/data/united_kingdom
from which data for individual UK radiosonde stations can be selected (Note: access to the
radiosonde data requires a username and password from BADC). Data for individual
stations can be downloaded as ‘gzipped’ files for each individual year for which for which
they are available (typically 1990-2002 for the ‘operational’ stations). Once a ‘gzipped’
file has been downloaded it must be ‘gunzipped’ using the UNIX command ‘gunzip’,
which will yield a ‘tar’ archive for the given year. This ‘tar’ archive must be ‘unpacked’
using the UNIX ‘tar –xvf’ command, resulting in an ASCII text file of data being
produced for each month of radiosonde data within the ‘tar’ archive, resulting in typically
12 monthly files of ASCII data being created from each ‘tar’ archive. The size of the
‘gunzipped’ archive for each year for a station is about 1 megabyte. However, once
15
expanded into ASCII form the data for each year takes up roughly 6.5 megabytes, so for
the four stations used in this study that covered a period of seven years, the total size of
ASCII data files would be 182 megabytes. A sample of part of one of the monthly ASCII
data files is shown in figure 5.
Figure 5: The beginning of ASCII file hemsby.199001 which shows part of the first
radiosonde ascent profile for January 1st 1990, for synoptic hour 00 (12 midnight on
the 31st December).
The first line of hemsby.199001 is the header that appears at the start of each synoptic
ascent profile. It consists of at station identifier ‘03496’ for Hemsby, a year-month-day
number ‘19900101’, a synoptic hour number ‘00’, the decimal latitude and longitude in
degrees of the station ’52.68 1.68’, and the altitude of the launch point above sea level in
16
metres ‘14’. The next line contains the ascent profile column titles, PP for pressure in 100
x mb, HT for height above sea level in metres, TT and TD are temperatures in degrees
Kelvin, DD is the wind direction in degrees from north and FF is the wind speed in m/s.
The third line is the start of the ascent profile data itself, and consists of the data described
in the column headings going from the height of the balloon launch point, up to about 20
or 30 km. Bad or missing data is signified by the rogue-value –9999999.0 or –9999999 .
Immediately after the end of the profile shown in figure 5, will be a header similar to line
one except that the synoptic hour code will be ‘06’, signifying the start of the 6am GMT
profile.
17
5. THE CHOICE OF RADIOSONDE STATIONS USED
In order to complete the study within the time period allocated and to avoid problems with
overrunning computer disk quota allocations (only 520 megabytes), the number of
radiosonde stations used, and the temporal duration of the study needed to be limited.
From figure 4, it was decided to limit the number of stations used to four, plus one
‘surrogate’ station to be used for model testing. The four principle stations chosen where,
Camborne in Cornwall, Hemsby in East Anglia, Hillsborough in Northern Ireland, and
Lerwick in the Shetland Islands. It was felt that these four stations gave a good ‘spatial
coverage’ around the periphery of the UK. The radiosonde station at Herstmonceux in
Southeast England was used as the ‘surrogate’ station to replace Hemsby in the models for
test purposes.
The format of the ASCII data files changed at the end of 1996, and the frequency of
‘significant pressure level’ observations during ascents decreased significantly. So in order
to maintain an equal contribution to the wind roses from each year of observation data,
and to avoid having to run the data pre-processing AML scripts twice for each station, it
was decided to limit the duration of the study to the years 1990 to 1996 inclusive. For all
five stations this still represents 210 megabytes of ASCII data (Herstmonceux, data was
only available for the last two months of 1992, and for 1993-96 inclusive).
18
6. PRE-PROCESSING OF THE ASCII DATA
The ASCII data files containing the raw monthly radiosonde data for a given station, as
shown in figure 5, must be reformatted and concatenated into an ASCII file easily read by
a PV-WAVE program. This new file must contain the data for the whole period for which
it is desired to generate a wind rose for the given station location. This pre-processing was
carried using a program written in ESRI’s Arc Macro Language (AML), which can be run
using ESRI’s ArcInfo GIS software. The AML program to perform the pre-processing is
called ‘vertread9096he.aml’, with ‘9096’ referring to the years covered, and ‘he’ to the
particular radiosonde station; Hemsby in this case. A listing of the program is given in
Appendix A. Figure 6, shows a section of the reformatted ASCII data file output by
‘vertread9096he.aml’.
Figure 6: The beginning of ASCII file verthemsby9096.dat, which shows several

radiosonde ascent profiles for January 1st 1990, for synoptic hours 00, 06, 12 and part
of 18.
Since this study only requires wind speed and direction up to an altitude of 3000 metres,
the reformatted data shown in figure 6, has its profiles truncated at 3000 metres. As a
result of this truncation, file verthemsby9096.dat which represents seven years of
19
radiosonde data concatenated from 84 individual monthly files, is only 17 megabytes in
size. Thus for the four principle radiosonde stations used, this pre-processing has reduced
the data volume from 182 megabytes to only 68 megabytes.
The file ASCII file verthemsby9096.dat is further compressed by the PV-WAVE program
‘heipvertwind.pro’ (see Appendix A), into a binary data file hemsbyvertwind9096.dat of
only 3.3 megabytes in size (around 13 megabytes for all four stations). Figure 7, shows an
excerpt from this new binary file.
Figure 7: The beginning of binary file hemsbyvertwind9096.dat, which shows several

radiosonde ascent profiles up to 3000 m altitude, for January 1st and 2nd 1990.
Figure 7, shows how the program ‘heipvertwind.pro’ has removed the latitude and
longitude co-ordinates of the station, as well as the station height. More importantly the
program has removed any data lines having invalid values of wind speed or direction.
20
Invalid pressure values are still present but have been flagged with the rogue-value minus
1x107.
A final pre-processing step is done by the PV-WAVE program ‘hevertdoublesremove.pro’
(see Appendix A) which removes ‘duplicate data lines’ from the data in
hemsbyvertwind9096.dat. Occasionally, duplicated lines consisting of the exactly the
same wind speed and direction information will be seen in the data. From the context in
which these duplicates appear, often associated with an error in the pressure reading, it is
clear that they are some sort of error in the radiosonde system. The corrected data, after
duplicate removal is placed in the binary file hemsbyvertwindND9096.dat, which still has
the same format as shown in figure 7. The size of this new file for seven years worth of
data is still about 3.3 megabytes, since the duplicates only make up about 0.3% of the total
data.
6.1 Wind Statistics from the Pre-processed Data

The pre-processed radiosonde data binary files for each station, such as
hemsbyvertwindND9096.dat for Hemsby, can be used directly to obtain mean wind speeds
and direction for the study period (1990-96 for the principle stations, 1992-96 for the
surrogate station). The PV-WAVE program ‘windND_datastats.pro’ (see Appendix A)
determines mean wind speed and vector direction for various altitude levels, using the
complex number method for representing 2D vectors as described by Jones (1998). The
results of applying this program to the data from the five stations are shown in table 1. The
information in table 1 was derived from a more comprehensive table held in the Microsoft
Excel document ‘radiosonde_stn_stats.xls’ (see Appendix B).
21
Table 1: mean wind speed and mean vector direction for the five radiosonde stations
for various altitude levels. Note: values calculated directly from the pre-processed
radiosonde profile time-series data.
Camborne 1990-96 altitude 87 m above sea level (asl)
1457-3000m asl
mean wind speed 12.2 m/s using 34233 observations variance 49 Standard Deviation 7.0 m/s
mean height 2112 metres asl
mean vector direction (degrees) 266 mean pressure 787 mb using 26426 observations
850 mb pressure level

mean vector direction (degrees) 260 mean height 1471 metres asl

Herstmonceux 1992-96 altitude 52m above sea level (asl)
1457-3000m asl


1457-3000m asl


Hillsborough 1990-96 altitude 37 m above sea level (asl)
1457-3000m asl


Lerwick 1990-96 altitude 82 m above sea level (asl)
1457-3000m asl


22
7. WIND ROSE CREATION
Once pre-processing of the radiosonde data for the four principle stations and one
surrogate station was complete, the next step towards creating windroses from the data
was to create data entities called ‘Wind Data Objects’ (WDOs) for the required altitude
levels (300-500 m agl and 1457-3000 m asl).
7.1 The Wind Data Object (WDO)

The WDO is essentially a very high resolution wind rose, consisting of an unusually large
number of direction sectors and wind speed bands. Whereas, the conventional wind rose of
Jones (1981) has twelve direction sectors and four wind speed bands, the WDOs used in
this study have 30 wind speed bands (with central speed values of 0.5 to 29.5 m/s), and 72
direction sectors (with central azimuths from north of 5o to 360o). For example, figure 8
shows 1990-96 geostrophic WDO for Hemsby.
synoptic observations. Note: The 72 direction bins along the x-axis correspond to the
angles 5-360 degrees in 5 degree increments (raw radiosonde angles are given to the
nearest 5 degrees). The 30 speed bands along the y-axis have widths of 1m/s, with central
values of 0.5 to 29.5 m/s. The z-axis shows the percentage value in each cell.
For the years 1990-96, WDOs were created for the geostrophic level (1457 – 3000 m asl)
and the 300-500 m agl level for the four principle stations, and just the geostrophic level
for Herstmonceux (the surrogate station). WDOs can be conveniently visualised as an
23
array of the percentage of the time for which the wind is blowing from a particular
azimuth, at a given speed (see figure 8).
The WDO stage in the processing sequence is important because once created the WDOs
provide a very compact way to store the radiosonde data, each WDO being only 29
kilobytes in size. Additionally, conventional ‘low resolution’ wind roses of any desired
direction sector, or wind speed band format, can easily be created from the WDOs. Also,
the WDOs provide a standardised input data format for the spatial interpolation, and
atmospheric boundary layer models used later in this study. Finally, mean wind speeds and
mean vector directions can be estimated from the WDOs without reference back to the
pre-processed radiosonde time-series data. However, it should be noted that geostrophic
(1457-3000m) mean wind speeds estimated from WDOs are approximately 0.4 to 0.6 m/s
less than those estimated from the time-series data (for 1457-3000m), because the ‘tail’ of
the wind speed distribution in the WDO has been truncated at 30 m/s. The 1457-3000m
altitude range was chosen to represent the geostrophic winds, since the literature describes
the 850 mb pressure level as being reliably geostrophic (Troen and Petersen, 1989 and
Borresen, 1987), with the wind speed and direction above this level remaining constant up
to the top of the troposphere at ~10 km. The 850 mb level corresponds to 1457 m asl in the
1976 Standard Atmosphere Model given in Jacobson (1999), so the 1457-3000m asl range
was chosen to provide plentiful individual wind speed and direction observations to ‘fill
out’ the geostrophic WDO. For example, seven years of data for 1457-3000m asl yields
about 35000 individual observations, whereas using just the 850 mb level will give only
around 7000 (see table 1).
The PV-WAVE programs used to create the 1990 to 1996 WDOs for the radiosonde
station at Hemsby, are ‘heweibullrose850_72.pro’ for the 1457-3000m asl level, and
‘heweibullrose300500m_72.pro’ for the 300-500m agl level. Both these programs are
given in Appendix A. The programs to create WDOs for the other stations are essentially
the same. The WDOs created for Hemsby are stored in the binary data files
30band73rose9096hem.dat and 30band73rose300500m9096hem.dat, for the geostrophic
and 300-500m levels respectively. Again, the data file naming conventions for the other
stations are similar.
24
Table 2: Mean wind speeds and mean vector directions, derived from the WDOs for
all five radiosonde stations.

mean wind speed 11.8 m/s








Mean wind speeds and vector directions for the study period (1990-96) can be obtained
from the WDOs using the PV-WAVE program ‘30band73rose9096_WDO_stats.pro’, for
the geostrophic WDOs, and ‘30band73rose300500m9096_WDO_stats.pro’ for the 300-
500m agl level (both listings are given in Appendix A). Both use programs make use of
the complex number method for representing 2D vectors as described by Jones (1998).
Table 2 shows wind speeds and directions derived from the WDOs for all five radiosonde
stations.
25
Table 3: Mean wind speeds and mean vector directions, for the 5-10 m/s wind speed
band derived from the WDOs for all five radiosonde stations.



300-500m agl for winds between 5 and 10 m/s (from time-series data)






The HARM acid rain model makes use of the wind rose valid for 400m agl, for the 5-10
m/s wind speed band. Table 3 shows wind speeds and direction for this speed band, at the
geostrophic level and 300-500m agl (which is used in this study as surrogate for 400m
agl). It is clear from table 3 that the magnitude of the anticlockwise rotation of the mean
wind vector direction when going from the geostrophic to 300-500m agl level is far less (a
26
few degrees clockwise in some cases) for the 5-10 m/s wind speed band, than the case
with all wind speed bands, which gave about 20o of anticlockwise rotation (see table 2).
The information in tables 2 and 3 was derived from a more comprehensive table held in
the Microsoft Excel document ‘radiosonde_stn_stats.xls’ (see Appendix B).
7.2 The Wind Rose plotting program

The wind rose plotting program is called ‘roseplot_from_dataslab_6pc.pro’ (see Appendix
A), and transforms a measured WDO in to a 12-sector, 4-speed band, wind rose plot and
table, using the same format as the Jones (1981) rose. The program makes use of a series
of ‘IF THEN’ tests contained within a ‘FOR NEXT’ loop to reassign the ‘percentage
energy’ from an azimuth/wind-speed cell in the WDO, to the appropriate rose sector and
speed band within the conventional rose. Figure 9, shows a wind rose plot created by the
program from the 1457-3000m asl WDO for Lerwick. The labels ‘speed band 1’ to ‘speed
band 4’ in figure 9, refer to the wind speed bands for, less than 5 m/s, 5 to 10 m/s, 10 to 15
m/s, and over 15 m/s. Table 4 shows the Lerwick 1457-3000m rose in tabular form.
Appendix C contains similar rose plots for all the radiosonde stations used in this study,
for the 1457-3000m asl and 300-500m agl levels.
Table 4: The geostrophic (1457-3000m asl), 12-sector, 4-speed band wind rose for the
27
Figure 9: The geostrophic (1457-3000m asl), 12-sector, 4-speed band wind rose for
the Lerwick radiosonde station, for the years 1990-96. (Note: north is at the top, and
the axes are annotated with percentage values. The minus signs are a plotting artifact and
should be ignored)
28
8. THE MEAN UK GEOSTROPHIC WINDROSE (1990-96)
The four principal radiosonde stations used in this study (Camborne, Hemsby,
Hillsborough, and Lerwick) were used to create a mean geostrophic WDO for the UK, by
taking the mean average of the individual 1457-3000m asl WDOs. The PV-WAVE
program used to calculate this mean UK WDO is called ‘meangeostrophic.pro’ (see
Appendix A). This mean UK WDO has been used to generate the wind rose shown in
figure 10, and table 5.
Lerwick. Wind speed bands 1 to 4 (under 5 m/s, 5-10 m/s, 10-15 m/s, 15 m/s upwards)
are plotted as individual wind roses. (Note: north is at the top, and the axes are
annotated with percentage values. The minus signs are a plotting artefact and should be
ignored)
A total of 135966 individual radiosonde observations of wind speed and direction, over a
period of seven years were used to create the mean UK geostrophic WDO.
29
Table 5: A seven year (1990-96) mean UK geostrophic, 1457-3000m above ground
level (agl) wind rose, calculated from 135966 synoptic wind speed observations at
Camborne, Hemsby, Hillsborough and Lerwick.
The mean vector wind direction derived from the mean UK geostrophic WDO (1990-96)
is 260o clockwise from North. The mean WDO derived geostrophic (1457-3000m asl)
wind speed is 11.77 m/s. The mean vector wind direction for the 5-10 m/s wind speed
band, obtained from the geostrophic WDO, is 266o from North.
If the HARM model is to be run using the mean UK geostrophic rose for 5-10 m/s (see
figure 10, speed band 2) as a surrogate for the ‘400m elevation’ 5-10 m/s rose, using a
wind speed 10% less than the geostrophic value (as described by Jones, 1981). It is
suggested that the wind speed be measured at the 850mb level, so as to remain consistent
with the geostrophic wind literature (Borresen, 1987 and Troen, I. and Petersen, 1989).
The mean 850mb level geostrophic wind speed (1990-96) for the four principle stations is
11.81 m/s, with the Jones (1981) 10% reduction giving a ‘400m agl’ value of 10.63 m/s
for the wind speed to be used in a pollution model such as HARM. This value of 10.63
m/s is close to the 10.44 m/s wind speed currently used in HARM model runs (Nicholson,
2002, pers comm).
The original Jones (1981, p19) wind rose is shown in figure 11, and table 6, to facilitate
comparison with the new UK mean rose (figure 10, table 5).
30
Figure 11: The Jones (1981) ‘400 metre’ wind rose displayed as a series of sector
plots. (Note: north is at the top, and the axes are annotated with percentage values. The
minus signs are a plotting artifact and should be ignored)
Table 6: A representative wind rose for use in long-range dispersion calculation

(from Jones, 1981, p19).
It is noticeable that the 5-10 m/s wind speed band (that is used by HARM) of the Jones
(1981) rose (see figure 11), has a significant northerly component that is missing from the
31
corresponding band on the new UK mean rose (see figure 10). The effects of these
differences between the wind roses on the HARM output have been investigated below.
8.1 HARM output comparisons for the Jones (1981) and mean UK (1990-96) wind
roses
Nicholson has prepared maps showing the differences in HARM modelled deposition
across the UK, between HARM 11.5 model runs using the Jones (1981) wind rose, and the
new mean UK wind rose shown in figure 10 (Nicholson, 2002, pers comm). These
comparison runs used the standard HARM single-layer model with 1997 emissions and
rainfall, with a wind speed of 10.44 m/s. Nicholson has provided maps for differences in
sulphur deposition, oxidised nitrogen deposition, and reduced nitrogen (ammonia)
deposition, for both wet and dry deposition conditions (these are shown in Appendix D, as
figures D1, D2 and D3 respectively). The HARM annual deposition budgets (in kT) using
the Jones (1981) and new wind rose are shown in table 7.
Table 7: HARM 11.5 annual deposition budgets in kT, using 1997 emissions and
rainfall, for the Jones (1981) and mean UK (1990-96) wind rose (Nicholson, 2002,
pers comm).
It can be seen from table 7, that all types of HARM modelled deposition are slightly
increased by the use of the new 1990-96 mean UK wind rose. In particular wet sulphur
deposition over the UK is increased by almost 5% (see figure D1, in Appendix D, for the
corresponding map). Figure D1, shows that the new UK wind rose has led to increased
sulphur deposition over some parts of Northwest Scotland of greater than 1kg per hectare
per year, due to the decrease in the northerly wind component.
32
9. THE SPATIAL LEAST-SQUARES LINEAR INTERPOLATION
MODEL
This section describes a model that has been developed to spatially interpolate the
geostrophic (1457-3000m asl) WDOs measured at the radiosonde stations, to any
intervening point in the UK Ordnance Survey grid.
9.1 Fitting a plane surface by least-squares

The fitting of a planar surface to four or more data points by least squares is described by
Pedder (1981, p58) and in matrix algebra form by Harbaugh (1964, p7 & p29-30).
Harbaugh’s technique was used as PV-WAVE supports matrix algebra. For example, if
Easting (x) and Northing (y) co-ordinates of a number (greater than three) of observation
stations are known, along with the observed quantity to be interpolated, z (say, geostrophic
wind speed at 850 mb). Then the least squares planar trend surface:
z trend = A + Bx + Cy (9)
can be found by evaluating the following matrix system to solve the normal equations:
−1
k x y z A
2
x x xy ⋅ zx = B (10)
2
y xy y zy C
given that:
x = x1 + x 2 + x3 ... + x k
y = y1 + y 2 + y 3 ... + y k
z = z1 + z 2 + z 3 ... + z k
where k is the number of stations. Figure 12, shows the example where geostrophic wind
speeds (850 mb) measured at the four principal radiosonde stations, have been subjected to
least squares planar interpolation across the UK. The least squares planar demonstration
PV-WAVE program used to create figure 12, is called ‘ukgeosmap3.pro’ and is listed in
Appendix A. Interestingly, the contours of geostrophic wind speed shown on figure 12,
compare fairly well (despite the limitations of the planar surface) with a similar map on
page 31 of Troen and Petersen (1989). The main difference being that the 850 mb wind
speeds in figure 12 are uniformly 0.4 to 0.5 m/s greater across the UK than those on Troen
and Petersen’s (1989) map.
33
Figure 12: Mean geostrophic wind speeds at the 850 mb level (1990-96), interpolated
between four radiosonde stations using a planar surface fitted by least squares. (Note:
the measured 850mb wind speed values at the stations where, Camborne 11.5 m/s,
Hemsby 11.0 m/s, Hillsborough 12.6 m/s, Lerwick 12.2 m/s (see table 1))
Since a planar surface cannot be an exact fit to the contributing data points, some
goodness of fit statistic is required to show how well the fitted surface represents the data.
Harbaugh (1964, p32) introduces some useful statistical measures, namely Error Measure
(EM) which is the sum of the squared residuals, divided by one minus the number of data
points (k):
(z obs − z trend )2
EM = (11)
k −1
34
(an error measure of zero indicates a perfect fit to the observed data values) and Percent of
total sum of squares (PTSOS) which is a measure of how well the fitted surface fits the
observed data. PTSOS is calculated using the following equation:
2
( z trend )
2
z trend −
k
PTSOS = (12)
2
( z obs )
2
z obs −
k
A PTSOS value of 100% indicates a perfect fit between the trend surface and the observed
data. For the 850 mb level winds example given in figure 12, the calculated EM value was
0.034, and the PTSOS value 90%.
9.2 Using fitted least squares planar surfaces to interpolate WDOs

The Wind Data Object (WDO) contains percentages for 72 wind direction sectors and 30
wind speed bands, contained in 2160 data bins or cells, taking the form of a 72 by 30
element data array (see figure 8). In order to create an interpolated WDO at a location
between the observation stations, an estimate needs to made of every one of the 2160 cells
at the new location. This is done by taking cells with the same speed band value and wind
direction, at each of the observation stations, and fitting a planar surface to their
percentage values. Thus, the resulting fitted surface can be used to generate the equivalent
cell percentage value at the new location. Since the WDO contains 2160 cells, this means
that 2160 independent least squares planar surfaces need to be determined. Once, the A, B
and C coefficients (see equation 9) have been found for all 2160 surfaces, these can be
used to generate an interpolated WDO at any location with the UK Ordnance Survey grid.
It should be remembered that WDOs determined by this model, for locations outside the
bounding rhomboid defined by the radiosonde station positions are extrapolated rather
than interpolated results.
The PV-WAVE program ‘geostrophictrendslab.pro’ (see Appendix A) has implemented

the WDO spatial least squares model described above. It can take data in the forms of
WDOs and station locations (O/S Eastings and Northings in metres) for four individual
radiosonde stations, and creates interpolated WDOs for each Ordnance Survey 100 km
35
grid square within the UK. Figure 13, shows wind roses representing all non-zero wind
speeds under 30 m/s, derived from the WDOs produced for each O/S 100km square, using
‘geostrophictrendslab.pro’. The wind roses themselves were made by a program called
‘geoswindplot.pro’,that uses the file geostrophicmodel9096uk.dat containing the modelled
WDOs output from ‘geostrophictrendslab.pro’.
Figure 13: Geostrophic (1457-3000m asl) wind roses for each 100km O/S square,
derived from WDOs at the four principal radiosonde stations, showing 12 direction
sectors for wind speeds greater than zero and less than or equal to 30 m/s. (Note:
figure 13, covers the same area on the ground as figure 12, and the scale on each wind
rose is 20%. The principal stations are, Camborne, Hemsby, Hillsborough and Lerwick)
36
Figure 13 demonstrates that the least squares planar trend surface approach to
interpolating WDOs can interpolate them smoothly across the UK without any obvious
artefacts being introduced. Figure 14, shows the same wind roses as given in figure 13, but
superimposed upon each other.
Figure 14: Geostrophic wind roses for each 100km O/S square, superimposed one
upon the other, derived from WDOs at the four principal radiosonde stations,
showing 12 direction sectors for wind speeds greater than zero and less than or equal
to 30 m/s. (Note: the scale on each wind rose is 20%)
From figures 13 and 14 it can be seen that the most prominent feature is the reduction of
the percent of the time that geostrophic winds are blowing from the West, dropping from
about 18% to 13% between Camborne and Lerwick. Figure 15, shows superimposed wind
speed histograms for all the 91 WDOs represented as wind roses in figure 14, and
demonstrates that variations of up to about 2% for each 1 m/s histogram ‘wind speed bin’
can occur across the UK. Also note that the superimposed histograms differ the least at 8.5
m/s wind speed.
In addition to providing WDO estimates for each O/S grid square the least squares planar
trend surface model can also ‘be run to a given location’ to give an estimated geostrophic
(1457-3000m asl) WDO for given O/S co-ordinates within the UK. The PV-WAVE
program ‘geostrophictrendslab_locationWDO_he.pro’ runs the model in this mode, see
Appendix A.
The goodness of fit statistics for the least squares planar trend surface model are calculated
by the PV-WAVE program ‘geostrophictrendslab_with_stats.pro’. This derives EM and
PTSOS values for each of the 2160 fitted trend surfaces created by the model, and records
their minimum, mean and maximum values, and works out the PTSOS standard deviation.
37
For the model run with the four principal stations, or the model run with Hemsby replaced
by Herstmonceux (the surrogate station) for test purposes, the mean EM value was around
6x10-5 and the PTSOS value 75%, with PTSOS having a standard deviation of 28% over
all 2160 values. Thus demonstrating that the fitted surfaces are giving a fairly good
representation of the observed data.
Figure 15: 91 geostrophic wind speed histograms for all wind directions, derived
from the WDOs modelled for each O/S 100km grid square, using the least squares
planar model for the four principal stations. (Note: the wind speed bands are 1 m/s
wide)
38
10. THE SURFACE ROUGHNESS COUPLED EKMAN MODEL
The simple Ekman type model described at the end of section 3 was implemented as a PV-
WAVE program ‘ekman_geodrag.pro’, see Appendix A. This model uses the simple
Ekman spiral equations (3a and 3b in section 3) and links them to surface roughness via an
eddy viscosity, K, estimate. Given values of surface roughness length, z0 and geostrophic
wind speed, Vg, the geostrophic drag law (equation 8) can be used to estimate the friction
velocity, u* which can be inserted into equation 7 to obtain a value of eddy viscosity, K.
This K value can be used to obtain perpendicular wind vector components (u’ and v’) from
the Ekman spiral equations (3a and 3b) for any desired height z, within the Ekman layer
(see figure 16).
Given:
Surface roughness length, z0
Geostrophic wind speed, Vg
Use:
Geostrophic Drag Law to
determine the friction velocity,
u*
Given:
A fixed a priori value of the ‘inner layer’
height, h
Use:
K = ku* h
where k = von Karman’s constant,
to find the eddy viscosity, K
Use the eddy viscosity value, K, in the EKMAN

SPIRAL EQUATIONS:
u ' = V g − V g e − az cos(az )
v ' = V g e − az sin(az )
where a is a known function of K, to find the
perpendicular wind components u’ and v’ at a
height, z of 400 metres above ground level.
Figure 16: A conceptual flowchart of the surface roughness coupled Ekman model.
39
10.1 Using the WDO in the coupled Ekman model
Although, the coupled Ekman model is mathematically simple, the novel aspect of its use
in this project, is the way in which it has been applied to the geostrophic WDO to provide
a modelled WDO representing winds at 400 m agl. Each of the 2160 individual cells
within the WDO contains a value for the percent of the time that the wind blows from a
particular azimuth, for a particular wind speed. Each geostrophic WDO cell is thus
labelled with a representative direction (5 to 360 degrees) and wind speed value (0.5 to
29.5 m/s), see section 7. In order to ‘present’ the WDO to the coupled Ekman model, each
WDO cell is taken one at a time. The wind speed label of the cell is used as the
geostrophic wind speed, Vg in the Ekman spiral equations (3a and 3b), from which the
perpendicular wind components (u’ and v’) at 400 m above ground level can be
determined. The magnitude of the resultant wind speed can be found using Pythagoras’s
theorem (see equation 5), and is used to re label the WDO cell with a new wind speed
valid for 400 m agl. The u’ and v’ values for 400 m agl define a wind direction (-180o to
+180o) relative to the geostrophic direction, which must be corrected to a wind direction
clockwise from North by adding the original labelled cell direction at geostrophic height.
The wind speed and wind direction from North, thus calculated for 400m agl by the
model, become new wind speed and direction labels for the cell. This process is repeated
for all 2160 cells in the WDO. When the modelling process is complete all 2160 cells in
the WDO have new azimuth and wind speed labels, but retain their original percentage
values. So in essence the modelling of the WDO from geostrophic (1457-3000m asl) to
400m agl level is a re-labelling process. The values of the quantities friction velocity, u*
eddy viscosity, K and planetary boundary layer depth, DE, that are generated for each
WDO cell during the modelling process are stored as meta-data labels attached to each cell
in the new WDO. Wind speed and direction and meta-data values can be recovered from
the modelled 400 m agl WDO using the PV-WAVE program
“30band73rose9096hem_400model_Zo_0_0002_h35_WDO_stats.pro”. Conventional 12-
sector, 4 wind speed band wind roses can be generated from the Ekman modelled WDOs,
using the PV-WAVE program ‘roseplot_from_dataslab_400m.pro’.
Figure 17, shows a 5-10 m/s wind speed band wind rose modelled using the coupled
Ekman model (using h = 35 m, z0 = 0.0002 m), compared with the observed 5-10 m/s wind
rose for geostrophic height. The modelled rose shows the modest anticlockwise ‘rotation’
expected from theory, see section 3.
40
Figure 17: A comparison of the measured geostrophic (1457-3000m asl) wind rose at
Hemsby, and the 400 m agl rose modelled for Hemsby. (The Ekman model has been
run using z0 = 0.0002 metres, and h = 35 metres. Both roses show the 5-10 m/s wind speed
band used by HARM, and are valid for the period 1990-96)
10.2 Mean Ekman profiles

The mean values of eddy viscosity, K and geostrophic wind speeds, Vg derived from the
coupled Ekman modelling process, can be used in the Ekman spiral equations (3a & 3b),
can be used to derive a ‘mean’ Ekman wind speed profile for comparison with the raw
radiosonde wind speed observations. Figure 18, shows such a ‘mean’ Ekman curve, laid
over the original radiosonde observations.
Figure 18:Individually plotted Hemsby radiosonde wind speed measurements against

height (asl), for 1990-96. Also shown is a 50 metre height band ‘running mean’ wind
speed (rough line), and the Ekman wind speed profile for K = 4.1 m2/sec, Vg = 11.2
m/s (smooth curve).
41
The PV-WAVE programs used to create figure 18, are ‘ekman_profile2.pro’ and
‘windprofileplot.pro’.
The coupled Ekman model was also run for h = 80 metres, and z0 = 0.0002 metres (Troen
and Petersen (1989, p18) assign a z0 of 0.0002 metres for the sea), using the Hemsby
1457-3000m WDO as the input. The 5-10 m/s wind rose at 400m agl resulting from this
modelling was used to perform HARM runs. Comparison plots for these runs and HARM
runs done using the Jones (1981) rose are shown in Appendix D (figures D4 to D6).
Wind rose plots and tables (valid for 400 m agl) for coupled Ekman model runs using the
measured 1990-96 geostrophic (1457-3000m asl) wind rose for Hemsby, for:
h = 80 metres, and z0 = 0.0002 metres

and
are shown in Appendix E.
42
12. SURFACE ROUGHNESS OF THE UK
The mean surface roughness length, z0 for the UK has been estimated using values taken
from Troen and Petersen (1989). Troen and Petersen provide ‘roughness roses’ for 22
surface meteorological stations within the UK, consisting of 12 azimuth sectors and a
variable number of distance from station bands, out to a maximum of 10 to 15 km out
from the station. For this study the mean roughness length for the area around each station
was estimated by taking the mean value of the outermost distance band as shown in table
8.
Table 8: Roughness length estimates, z0, for 22 UK surface meteorological stations,

derived from Troen and Petersen 1989.
Table 8, shows that the mean z0 value for the UK is 0.16 metres with a standard deviation
of 0.12 metres. This value of 0.16 metres for z0 is close to the European and North
American average (Stull, 1988, p380), and corresponds to ‘farmland with a closed
appearance’ (Troen and Petersen, 1989, p58). Both Stull (1988, p380) and Troen and
Petersen (1985, p58) provide figures which relate land cover type to z0 value.
43
14. THE HEMSBY RADIOSONDE STATION
Synoptic wind observations for the period 1990-96 from the radiosonde station situated at
Hemsby (52.48oN 1.68oE) in Norfolk have been used as a reference against which to
compare the outputs of spatial linear interpolation and Ekman spiral WDO models.
Figure 19: Map of the environs of Hemsby radiosonde station, showing 1:50 000 O/S
mapping out to a distance from the station of approximately 15 km. (produced using
Ordnance Survey 1:50 000 scale colour raster data from EDINA Digimap;
http://digimap.edina.ac.uk, crown copyright reserved.)
44
A radiosonde balloon will attain geostrophic altitudes (~1500m and above) approximately
one hour after release (Oke, 1987, p317). The time to reach 500 metres altitude will thus
be roughly 20 minutes. In this study radiosonde observations between 300 and 500 metres
agl have been used as a reference against which to compare the modelled 400m agl wind
roses. Assuming typical 300-500m wind speeds in the range 9 to 12 m/s, the area
contributing surface roughness to the observations will take the form of an annulus of
inner radius 7 km and outer radius 15 km centred on the Hemsby station. Figure 19 shows
a map of the Hemsby area out to a distance of 15km. For the onshore areas of the annulus
a roughness length of z0 = 0.133 metres has been used, derived from observations made at
RAF Coltishall (52.75oN 1.35oE) which lies about 24 km WNW of Hemsby (see Troen
and Petersen, 1989, p498). This roughness length of 0.133 metres corresponds to
‘predominantly arable farmland, though with some parts well wooded’ (Troen and
Petersen, 1989, p498). The parts of the annulus that lie over the sea have been assigned a
z0 of 0.0002 metres (Troen and Petersen, 1989, p18). The roughness effects of the Great
Yarmouth urban area have been ignored.
45
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Jones, K. H., 1998. A Comparison of Algorithms used to Compute Hill Slope as a

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Landsberg, H. E., 1981. The Urban Climate (International geophysics series; volume
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Metcalfe, S. E., Whyatt, J. D., Broughton, R., Derwent, R. G., Finnegan, D., Hall, J.,
Mineter, M., O'Donoghue, M., Sutton, M. A., 2001. Developing the Hull Acid
Rain Model: its validation and implications for policy makers. Environmental
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Oke, T. R., 1987. Boundary Layer Climates. Methuen, London and New York, p435
Pedder, M. A., 1981a. Practical analysis of dynamical and kinematic structure:

principles, practice and errors. In Dynamical Meteorology, an introductory
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Pedder, M. A., 1981b. Practical analysis of dynamical and kinematic structure: more
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Ryan, B. C., 1974. A mathematical model for diagnosis and prediction of surface
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47
Appendix A
PV-WAVE and AML programs written for this study:
The program files are on the enclosed CD-ROM in directory Appendix_A

They had been previously in /tsunami14c/msc_stud/msc0220/radiosonde
The program files are listed alphabetically as follows:
30band73rose300500m9096hem_WDO_stats.pro
30band73rose9096hem_400model_Zo_0_0002_h35_WDO_stats.pro
30band73rose9096hem_WDO_stats.pro
ekman_geodrag.pro
ekman_profile2.pro
geostrophictrendslab.pro
geostrophictrendslab_locationWDO_he.pro
geostrophictrendslab_with_stats.pro
geoswindplot.pro
heipvertwind.pro
hevertdoublesremove.pro
heweibullrose300500m_72.pro
heweibullrose850_72.pro
meangeostrophic.pro
roseplot_from_dataslab_400m.pro
roseplot_from_dataslab_6pc.pro
vertread9096he.aml
windND_datastats.pro
windprofileplot.pro
Appendix B
The Microsoft Excel document radiosonde_stn_stats.xls
This spread-sheet is on the enclosed CD-ROM in directory Appendix_B

APPENDIX C
Measured Wind Roses at the Radiosonde Stations

Wind roses with 12-sectors and four wind speed bands, measured at the five
radiosonde stations. Wind roses are presented for two atmospheric levels, 1457-
3000m above sea level (the geostrophic level), and 300-500 above ground level.
Contents
03808 Camborne (50.22oN 5.32oW, altitude 87m above sea level)
1990-96 wind rose plots and tables for:
1457-3000m asl (using 33626 observations)
300-500m agl (using 4121 observations)
03882 Herstmonceux (50.90oN 0.32oE, altitude 52m above sea level)

03496 Hemsby (52.68oN 1.68oE, altitude 14m above sea level)

03920 Hillsborough (54.48oN 6.10oW, altitude 37m above sea level)

03005 Lerwick (60.13oN 1.18oW, altitude 82m above sea level)

Figure C1: Camborne 1990-96 (1457-3000m asl), wind speed bands 1 to 4 plotted
as individual wind roses. (Note: the 4 wind speed bands correspond to wind speeds,
under 5 m/s, 5-10 m/s, 10-15m/s, and 15 m/s upwards, respectively. North is at the
top, and the axes are annotated with percentage values. The minus signs are a
Table C1: The geostrophic (1457-3000m asl), 12-sector, 4-speed band wind rose
for the Camborne radiosonde station, for the years 1990-96.
Figure C2: Camborne 1990-96 (300-500m agl), wind speed bands 1 to 4 plotted
Table C2: The 300-500m agl, 12-sector, 4-speed band wind rose for the
Camborne radiosonde station, for the years 1990-96 (ground level is 87m asl).
Figure C3: Herstmonceux 1992-96 (1457-3000m asl), wind speed bands 1 to 4
plotted as individual wind roses. (Note: the 4 wind speed bands correspond to wind
speeds, under 5 m/s, 5-10 m/s, 10-15m/s, and 15 m/s upwards, respectively. North is
at the top, and the axes are annotated with percentage values. The minus signs are a
for the Herstmonceux radiosonde station, for the years 1992-96.
Figure C4: Hemsby 1990-96 (1457-3000m asl), wind speed bands 1 to 4 plotted as
individual wind roses. (Note: the 4 wind speed bands correspond to wind speeds,
for the Hemsby radiosonde station, for the years 1990-96.
Figure C5: Hemsby 1990-96 (300-500m agl), wind speed bands 1 to 4 plotted as
Table C5: The 300-500m agl, 12-sector, 4-speed band wind rose for the Hemsby
radiosonde station, for the years 1990-96 (ground level is 14m asl).
Figure C6: Hillsborough 1990-96 (1457-3000m asl), wind speed bands 1 to 4
plotted as individual wind roses. (Note: the 4 wind speed bands correspond to wind
speeds, under 5 m/s, 5-10 m/s, 10-15m/s, and 15 m/s upwards, respectively. North is
at the top, and the axes are annotated with percentage values. The minus signs are a
for the Hillsborough radiosonde station, for the years 1990-96.
Figure C7: Hillsborough 1990-96 (300-500m agl), wind speed bands 1 to 4 plotted
Table C7: The 300-500m agl, 12-sector, 4-speed band wind rose for the
Hillsborough radiosonde station, for the years 1990-96 (ground level is 37m asl).
Figure C8: Lerwick 1990-96 (1457-3000m asl), wind speed bands 1 to 4 plotted as
for the Lerwick radiosonde station, for the years 1990-96.
Figure C9: Lerwick 1990-96 (300-500m agl), wind speed bands 1 to 4 plotted as
Table C9: The 300-500m agl, 12-sector, 4-speed band wind rose for the Lerwick
radiosonde station, for the years 1990-96 (ground level is 82m asl).
Appendix D
Contents
Figure D1: The annual sulphur deposition differences between output from the
standard HARM 11.5 single-layer model with 1997 emissions and rainfall, for
the Jones (1981) wind rose and the new mean UK (1990-96) wind rose
(Nicholson, 2002, pers comm).
Figure D2: The annual nitrogen (oxidised nitrogen) deposition differences between
output from the standard HARM 11.5 single-layer model with 1997 emissions
and rainfall, for the Jones (1981) wind rose and the new mean UK (1990-96)
wind rose (Nicholson, 2002, pers comm).
Figure D3: The annual ammonia (reduced nitrogen) deposition differences between
and rainfall, for the Jones (1981) wind rose and the new mean UK (1990-96)
wind rose (Nicholson, 2002, pers comm).
Figure D4: The annual sulphur deposition differences between output from the
standard HARM 11.5 single-layer model with 1997 emissions and rainfall, for
the Jones (1981) wind rose and an Ekman modelled 400 m agl wind rose for
Hemsby (Nicholson, 2002, pers comm). The Ekman rose was modelled from
the observed 1457-3000m asl WDO at Hemsby (1990-96), using h = 80
metres, z0 = 0.0002 metres.
Figure D5: The annual nitrogen (oxidised nitrogen) deposition differences between
and rainfall, for the Jones (1981) wind rose and an Ekman modelled 400 m agl
wind rose for Hemsby (Nicholson, 2002, pers comm). The Ekman rose was
modelled from the observed 1457-3000m asl WDO at Hemsby (1990-96),
using h = 80 metres, z0 = 0.0002 metres.
Figure D6: The annual ammonia (reduced nitrogen) deposition differences between
and rainfall, for the Jones (1981) wind rose and an Ekman modelled 400 m agl
wind rose for Hemsby (Nicholson, 2002, pers comm). The Ekman rose was
modelled from the observed 1457-3000m asl WDO at Hemsby (1990-96),
using h = 80 metres, z0 = 0.0002 metres.
Figure D1: The annual sulphur deposition differences between output from the standard HARM 11.5 single-layer model with 1997
emissions and rainfall, for the Jones (1981) wind rose and the new mean UK (1990-96) wind rose (Nicholson, 2002, pers comm). (Note:
The differences are calculated as mean UK (1990-96) - Jones (1981), so any positive values indicate an increase in deposition when the new
mean wind rose is used. Concentrations are in kg (of S or N) per hectare per year and the resolution is 10km.)
Figure D2: The annual nitrogen (oxidised nitrogen) deposition differences between output from the standard HARM 11.5 single-layer
model with 1997 emissions and rainfall, for the Jones (1981) wind rose and the new mean UK (1990-96) wind rose (Nicholson, 2002, pers
comm). (Note: The differences are calculated as mean UK (1990-96) - Jones (1981), so any positive values indicate an increase in deposition
when the new mean wind rose is used. Concentrations are in kg (of S or N) per hectare per year and the resolution is 10km.)
Figure D3: The annual ammonia (reduced nitrogen) deposition differences between output from the standard HARM 11.5 single-layer
model with 1997 emissions and rainfall, for the Jones (1981) wind rose and the new mean UK (1990-96) wind rose (Nicholson, 2002, pers
comm). ( The differences are calculated as mean UK (1990-96) - Jones (1981), so any positive values indicate an increase in deposition when
the new mean wind rose is used. Concentrations are in kg (of S or N) per hectare per year and the resolution is 10km.)
Figure D4: The annual sulphur deposition differences between output from the standard HARM 11.5 single-layer model with 1997
emissions and rainfall, for the Jones (1981) wind rose and an Ekman modelled 400 m agl wind rose for Hemsby (Nicholson, 2002, pers
comm). The Ekman rose was modelled from the observed 1457-3000m asl WDO at Hemsby (1990-96), using h = 80 metres, z0 = 0.0002
metres. (The differences are calculated as Ekman Hemsby(1990-96) - Jones (1981), so any positive values indicate an increase in deposition
when the new mean wind rose is used. Concentrations are in kg (of S or N) per hectare per year and the resolution is 10km.)
Figure D5: The annual nitrogen (oxidised nitrogen) deposition differences between output from the standard HARM 11.5 single-layer
model with 1997 emissions and rainfall, for the Jones (1981) wind rose and an Ekman modelled 400 m agl wind rose for Hemsby
(Nicholson, 2002, pers comm). The Ekman rose was modelled from the observed 1457-3000m asl WDO at Hemsby (1990-96), using h =
80 metres, z0 = 0.0002 metres. (The differences are calculated as Ekman Hemsby(1990-96) - Jones (1981), so any positive values indicate an
increase in deposition when the new mean wind rose is used. Concentrations are in kg (of S or N) per hectare per year and the resolution is
10km.)
Figure D6: The annual ammonia (reduced nitrogen) deposition differences between output from the standard HARM 11.5 single-layer
model with 1997 emissions and rainfall, for the Jones (1981) wind rose and an Ekman modelled 400 m agl wind rose for Hemsby
(Nicholson, 2002, pers comm). The Ekman rose was modelled from the observed 1457-3000m asl WDO at Hemsby (1990-96), using h =
80 metres, z0 = 0.0002 metres. (The differences are calculated as Ekman Hemsby(1990-96) - Jones (1981), so any positive values indicate an
increase in deposition when the new mean wind rose is used. Concentrations are in kg (of S or N) per hectare per year and the resolution is
10km.)
Appendix E
Wind roses and tables Ekman modelled for 400 m agl
Wind roses and tables modelled for 400 m above ground level using the coupled Ekman
model with various values of surface roughness length, z0, and ‘inner layer height’, h.
The data input to the model was the observed geostrophic (1457-3000m asl) WDO for
Hemsby for 1990-96.
Contents
Figure E1: Speed bands 1 to 4 modelled for Hemsby at 400m agl, using h = 80m, z0 =
0.0002m, plotted as individual wind roses.
Table E1: A seven year (1990-96) Ekman modelled wind rose for Hemsby at 400m agl,
using h = 80m, z0 = 0.0002m. Calculated from the Hemsby 1990-96 (1457-
3000m) observed geostrophic WDO.
using h = 35m, z0 = 0.0002m. Calculated from the Hemsby 1990-96 (1457-
observed geostrophic WDO for Hemsby 1990-96. Also north is at the top, and the axes
are annotated with percentage values. The minus signs are a plotting artifact and should
be ignored)
Table E1: A seven year (1990-96) Ekman modelled wind rose for Hemsby at 400m
agl, using h = 80m, z0 = 0.0002m. Calculated from the Hemsby 1990-96 (1457-
be ignored)
agl, using h = 80m, z0 = 0.133m. Calculated from the Hemsby 1990-96 (1457-3000m)
be ignored)
agl, using h = 35m, z0 = 0.0002m. Calculated from the Hemsby 1990-96 (1457-

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The determination of regionalised wind roses for the UK, for use with the

HARM acid depositional model.

11th September 2002

Prof. Sarah Metcalfe

Dr. Claire Jarvis

The wind data object (WDO)

THE SPATIAL LINEAR INTERPOLATION MODEL

300-500m agl (ground is 14m asl)

WDO wind speed for 1457-3000m asl

WDO 1457-3000m asl, for winds between 5 and 10 m/s

WDO wind speed for 300-500m agl

WDO 300-500m agl, for winds between 5 and 10 m/s

Ekman spiral modelled WDOs Model derived variables

min PBL depth De 388 metres

min PBL depth De 296 metres

min PBL depth De 196 metres

real observations (%)

Modulus Differences (%)

Between actual observations (%)

Between actual observations

Haltner, G. J. and Williams, T. W., 1980. Numerical Prediction and Dynamic

Harbaugh, J. W., 1964. A Computer Method for Four-Variable Trend Analysis

Jacobson, M. Z., 1999. Fundamentals of Atmospheric Modeling. Cambridge University

Jones, K. H., 2002. Unpublished technical report.

NEGTAP, 2001. Transboundary Air Pollution: Acidification, Eutrophication and

2. The HARM acid rain model 1

3. The wind literature and the planetary boundary layer (PBL) 6

4. The synoptic radiosonde data 13

5. The choice of radiosonde stations used 18

6. Pre-processing of the ASCII data 19

7. Wind rose creation 23

8. The mean UK geostrophic wind rose (1990-96) 29

9. The Spatial Least-Squares Linear Interpolation model 33

10. The Surface Roughness Coupled Ekman Model 39

11. Surface Roughness of the UK 43

12. The Hemsby Radiosonde Station 44

Figure 2: Representation of the cycle of emission, transport and deposition of pollutants

Figure 6: The beginning of ASCII file verthemsby9096.dat, which shows several

Figure 7: The beginning of binary file hemsbyvertwind9096.dat, which shows several

Table 8: Roughness length estimates, z0, for 22 UK surface meteorological stations,

2. THE HARM ACID RAIN MODEL

HARM uses a Lagrangian receptor oriented statistical approach to provide estimates of

Figure 2: Representation of the cycle of emission, transport and deposition of

For each air parcel trajectory.

At the starting point of the air parcel trajectory

Move the air parcel one step at a time along a

When the receptor is reached, weight the

Combine the weighted pollution contributions

Repeat for each trajectory.

Repeat for each receptor cell in the UK.

Figure 3: An idealised flow chart of HARM’s structure, based on pseudo-code given

u ' = V g − V g e − az cos(az ) (3a)

v ' = V g e − az sin(az ) (3b)

where a is the Ekman parameter and is given by:

Magnitude of resultant wind speed Vres = (u ' ) 2 + (v ' ) 2 (5)

• Shanwell (03170) closed on 15/3/92. Synoptic observations were transferred to

• Crawley (03774) closed on 30/9/92, and was replaced by Herstmonceux (03882) on

• Standard Pressure Levels

4.1 The Radiosonde Windfinding Equipment

4.2 The UK radiosonde data files

Figure 6: The beginning of ASCII file verthemsby9096.dat, which shows several

Figure 7: The beginning of binary file hemsbyvertwind9096.dat, which shows several

6.1 Wind Statistics from the Pre-processed Data