ON WIND VELOCITY PROFILE MEASUREMENTS TAKEN IN WIND TUNNELS WITH SALTATING GRAINS

This paper reviews some aspects of wind tunnel experiments on sand-transporting winds. It follows previous papers that have discussed the influence of the outer region of the boundary layer on wind velocity measurements. This influence was quantified with the use Coles' Wake function. In this paper this correction is applied to six previously described wind velocity profiles. An attempt is made to calculate the profile parameter II from these measurements. The values found were not consistent with the expected II, which was determined by Coles for clean air flow. This value (II=0.55) was assumed to be valid in previous analyses for sand-transporting winds. Evidence for a mutual dependency of friction velocity and profile parameter is presented and the difficulty in determining u* is pointed out. It is suggested that the constant stress region of the boundary layer should be kept large enough for measurements when Coles' Wake function is not to be used in the data analysis.