Weather Monitoring

Electricity produced by renewable energy sources is rapidly coming into the mainstream. The drive to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels and produce energy from more environmentally friendly sources has led to an increasing number of projects to develop these resources. The use of compact weather stations and dataloggers in renewable energy applications is nothing new, but demand will doubtlessly increase as technology advances.

Renewable energy projects require the most precise weather monitoring instruments for initial assessment and system operation. IES partners in Canada and India with Lufft USA to provide Weather stations and sensors that are well suited to use in renewable energy applications. Precise profiling analyses for planned installations determine whether or not an investment is feasible and measures its potential success. During a one year initial investigation period data recording must be consistent to obtain a reliable basis for decision-making. The operation of a wind or solar power plant is not possible without reliable weather-related information. When observing environmental influences— solar radiation, strong winds, icing, visibility— control actions have to be deduced immediately for a project to succeed. After project nstallation, weather monitoring systems are permanently installed as part of the control system for each wind or solar energy project by feeding data into a project’s SCADA (Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition) system. Precise measuring is critical for a system that works by collecting information, transferring it back to a central control site, carrying out necessary analysis and control, and then displaying this data to a central database.

Wind applications:

Ventus

Extremely precise and maintenance-free measurement of wind velocity and wind direction as well as calculation of acoustic virtual temperature. Belongs to Lufft's WS family of professional intelligent sensors with digital and analog interfaces.The ultrasonic wind sensor is designed without mechanical parts as they have been used with traditional “cups and vanes”.

The digital or analog output delivers instantaneous, average, min or max value with flexible measuring rate. The VENTUS is heated in case reaching critical ambient conditions. Made for cold climate!

Recommended for:
- wind turbines
- marine/ships
- meteorology
- building automation

V200A

Extremely precise and maintenance-free measurement of wind velocity and wind direction as well as calculation of acoustic virtual temperature. Belongs to Luffts WS family of professional intelligent sensors with digital and analog interfaces. The ultrasonic wind sensor is designed without mechanical parts as they have been used with traditional “cups and vanes”. The digital or analog output delivers instantaneous, average, min or max value with flexible measuring rate. The VENTUS is heated in case reaching critical ambient conditions.

Recommended for:
- meteorology
- building automation

IES and Lufft provide a wide range application sensors to cater to your specific requirement:

Basic: Recommended for:
               - Building Engineering
               - Environmental measurement
               - Wind turbines
               - Solar plants
               - Meteorology

Industry: Recommended for:
                - Industrial applications
                - Wind turbines
                - Building Engineering
                - Crane wind alarm systems
                - Cold weather
                - Environmental measuring

Professional: Recommended for:
                - Offshore wind
                - Meteorology wind alarm systems
                - Power stations
                - Airports
                - Military and cruise ships

UMB Technology

The UMB (Universal Measurement Bus) system is new technology for recording environmental data. Regardless of whether in the form of a standard weather station or road ice warning equipment, the modular system excels due to easy commissioning, free firmware updates and data transfer over RS232, RS485 or GPRS modem. UMB offers flexibility, modularity and web-based visualization and polling software. The UMB sensor library provides a comprehensive range of environmental sensors for recording temperature, relative humidity, precipitation, visibility and road conditions. The new WS series compact weather stations, in particular, are outstanding due to their unrivaled price-performance ratio. The top-of-the-range model, WS600-UMB, incorporates sensors for temperature, humidity, precipitation, air pressure, wind direction and wind speed.

The electrical connection for all UMB sensors is made via a standard plug connector system. This keeps installation and service costs to a minimum. Third party sensors and existing analog sensors can be integrated into the UMB system using the ANACON-UMB module.

All UMB sensors can be polled by means of a standard protocol. Once data polling has been incorporated for one sensor, additional sensors can be added by way of easy parameterization of the data polling system. Channel-oriented sensor data polling delivers a large number of computed variables in metric and US format. Thus there is no need for conversion by the user. Sensors can be configured, equipment tested and firmware updated with the free configuration software (UMBConfig-Tool).

Precipitation

R2S-UMB Precipitation Sensor

The drop speed is captured with a 24-GHz-Doppler radar. The precipitation quantity and intensity is calculated from the correlation between drop size and speed. The type of precipitation (rain, snow, sleet, freezing rain, hail) is detected from the difference in drop speed.

The measurement data are available for further processing in the form of a standard protocol (Lufft UMB protocol).

Here is a summary of the Lufft UMB sensors:

R2S-UMB Precipitation Sensor