MFI

The Momentum Flux Intercomparison project flew the King Air to evaluate the performance of the interferometric NCAR profiler during one week in November 1992. UHF wind profilers have proven their usefulness for atmospheric boundary layer studies by providing continuous and accurate estimates of the mean 3D wind profile. However, the Doppler beam swinging technique commonly used assumes an homogenous wind field over its multiple beam directions. NCAR is developing a boundary layer Doppler interferometric profiler which implements interferometric techniques by using multiple receivers in order to derive the three wind components from a single transmitted beam direction. This innovative method should also prove extremely well suited for accurate estimations of the momentum flux in the atmospheric boundary layer. In this experiment, we evaluate the performance of the interferometric profiler by comparing its results with in-situ measurements of the momentum flux obtained by aircraft.