Mobile measurement techniques for local and micro-scale studies in urban and topo-climatology

Abstract

Technical development during the last two decades has brought new potential and new applications for ­mobile measurements. In this paper, we present six case studies where mobile measurement devices were used to acquire data for meteorological and climatological research. Three case studies deal with ground-based mobile measurements – on buses for urban climate measurements and on a vessel on a lake – and three with airborne platforms – on a cable car and on an unmanned aerial vehicle for vertical soundings and on a tethered balloon sonde for cloud physics. For each study, we describe the measurement set-up and address the potential and drawbacks of these applications. At the end, we discuss general aspects related to mobile observations especially concerning the time and space dimension of measurements.

Keywords

• Mobile measurements
• planetary boundary layer
• urban climatology
• atmospheric sounding
• ­micro-scale climatology