WindTrax is a tool for solving environmental problems that involve micrometeorology. It has been designed by research micrometeorologists to be used by non-specialists in the analysis of atmospheric measurements. WindTrax 1.0 is particularly useful for a class of short-range atmospheric transport problems, particularly those involving "source detection and quantification", where measurements of contaminant concentrations in the air are exploited to infer the amount of gas being released.
The following sections will examine the basic applications of WindTrax and outline the help pages available.
Table of ContentsIn addition to explaining how to use the program WindTrax, this help guide contains background information on micrometeorology and wind transport (atmospheric transport and dispersion). This information is not required in order to use the software, but will provide you a general understanding of the ideas underlaying it.
An introduction to WindTrax ➔ what the program does, how it works, and how to use itIf you are using WindTrax you probably have an interest in atmospheric transport, or need to solve a problem that is linked to atmospheric transport. We foresee WindTrax as being helpful, for example, to engineers or agriculturists that would like to know the emission rate of a gas from a trial plot or a farmer's field. The technical content of WindTrax is micrometeorological. There is no chemistry; there is no agronomy; there is just the application of state-of-the-art knowledge of particle trajectories in the wind, to help analyze or solve environmental problems that can fall in the sphere of knowledge of very different disciplines.
Limitations of WindTraxSoftware versions 1.0 and 2.0 are restricted to the analysis of transport on the "microscale," where source-detector distances are less than about one kilometer. As well, WindTrax applies to the set of restricted cases where the wind blows undisturbed over bare ground or short vegetation. Although these requirements are restrictive, many experiments in agricultural and environmental science will meet these conditions.
In general, obstacles such as buildings, windbreaks, hills or crop/forest boundaries disturb the wind. A soon-to-come development will be the option to read into WindTrax a gridded wind field (perhaps a combination of measurements and flow modeling). Further along the road, wind-calculations will be added, and eventually modules to calculate radiation, and so forth. The culmination we envisage is a drag-and-drop program that permits you to visually "design" or represent your own landscape, and to infer the implied patterns of wind, temperature, humidity, radiation, snow drift, and so on.
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