Corrected Sailplane Measurements

CFD

We have discovered a bias in the temperatures measured at high velocity flights such as in the motorized sky-diving plane (~300 km/h). We attributed the bias to adiabatic heating caused by the air compressing inside the instrument box and proposed a correction formula to account for this effect. It turns out that this correction needs to be applied also to data from not-so-high-speed flights, such as from sailplanes (~100 km/h). Here is an example of an anomalous thermal, which was measured to be colder than the surrounding air (the faded ‘x’ tick marks, blue is background, red is thermal). After the correction, the data show a reasonable temperature profile for both inside and outside of the thermal (red and blue, respectively).

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