The ultrafast aircraft thermometer is an airborne device designed for measuring temperature in clouds with centimeter spatial resolution. Its sensor consists of 5mm long and 2.5μm thick thermo-resistive wire protected against impact of cloud droplets by a shield in the form of a suitably shaped rod, placed upstream. However the disturbances of airflow around this rod result in noise in the temperature record. Suction applied through slits located on both sides of the rod reduces the noise generated by vortices shed from the rod and lowers the probability of droplet-wire collisions. Our recent theoretical analysis and numerical simulations led to optimization of this device and additionally clarified the role of the sampling method in processing of the analogue output of the thermometer. In this paper we try to deepen our understanding of the nature of the noise as well as to improve calculations of the corrections connected with the dynamic heating. For this purpose we have done extensive three-dimensional numerical simulations of the airflow around the protective rod and the sensing wire, which permitted precise computation of dynamic heating and showed how applying the suction removes the thermal boundary layer from the rod and damps the sources of the noise.
Small-scale inhomogeneities of the atmospheric temperature field are caused by air turbulence and result in refractive index fluctuations, which in turn influence the propagation of optical beams. Understanding small density fluctuations in the atmosphere is important for the free-space laser communication and for high-resolution imaging through the atmosphere. The ultra-fast aircraft resistance thermometer constructed in the Institute of Geophysics, Warsaw University, measures the temperature of cloudless air and of warm clouds with 10 kHz sampling frequency. During a flight at the speed of 100 m/s, at low altitudes up to 2 km, this corresponds to the spatial resolution of the order of one centimeter. This resolution is sufficient for studying small density fluctuations in the atmospheric boundary layer. A streamlined shield protects the sensing wire of the thermometer from cloud droplets and other small particles suspended in the air but introduce aerodynamic disturbances in the form of vortices. The thermometer records the resulting fluctuations of temperature as noise. The shield sucks air and water collected on its surface through the suction slits. This suction also suppresses the disturbances. In this paper we analyze how the temperature measurements are influenced by: (i) turbulence generated behind the shield placed in front of the sensing wire; (ii) suction of air through the shield slits; (iii) cloud droplets of various space distributions, masses and velocities. We have carried out the 2D numerical simulations of the time-dependent, incompressible, viscous flow (the Navier-Stokes equation) around the shield placed in a uniform stream. We solved the particle path equations for an ensamble of droplets in the Stokes approximation. All the simulations are oriented toward optimization of the shield shape in order to (i) reduce noise in measurements at low and high altitudes and (ii) protect the sensing wire against ice crystals in flights at high altitudes.
The recently improved ultra-fast aircraft resistance thermometer measures with a time constant of the order 0.1 ms. For an aircraft speed of 100 m/s this time constant corresponds to a spatial resolution of a few centimeters. Measurements made both in the atmosphere and in the low-turbulence wind tunnel at air speed 80 m/s are corrupted with noise of a few kHz frequency. Authors of the thermometer suggest that this noise results from turbulence introduced by vortex shedding from the protective shield. To achieve further improvement of the instrument we have to understand the nature of these aerodynamic disturbances. The present study is carried in two complementary directions. In the first, flow modeling is made with the FEATFLOW 1.2d - a finite element software for the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations. The results of flow simulation are in qualitative agreement with the experiment. In the second, we simulate visualization of the flow using two optical spatial filters: the Foucault filter that gives output intensity signal where bright bias is modulated with 1-D Hilbert transform of an object phase function and modified Zernike phase filter that shifts phase of the spectrum dc term by 0.2π.
Phase object visualization method is useful as a phase shift measurement technique when output image intensity signal is a known function of object phase or its derivative. This paper presents a comparison of performances of three real frequency domain filters: Foucault frequently called knife edge filter, Hoffman known in microscopy as a modulation contrast method and the semi-derivative filter. Its performance is simulated using Virtual Lab 1.O software in
4f imaging system with coherent illumination.
Our aim is to build a digital elevation model (DEM) for the basin of Rega River, a tributary of the Baltic Sea, on a 0.5 x 0.5 m grid. It is based on hand-drawn topographical maps in 1:10,000 scale scanned with 508 dpi accuracy. Then a digital terrain model (DTM) results from integration of DEM with remotely sensed data (space and airborne images) and detailed geodata. In this paper, we describe algorithms for noise removal, thinning and continuing contour lines, and interpolation of elevation data used to process the topographical maps.
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