Although the engineers at HOBO have come up with a pretty good system for measur

Question

Although the engineers at HOBO have come up with a pretty good system for measuring wind speed, temperature, humidity, and precipitation, it is inevitably not perfect. This is due to the system itself as well as to the location in which we have placed it. For each of the four sensors on a weather station, please identify 1 or 2 possible sources of error in the measurements

1a. Temperature (1 source, 1 point)

1b. Humidity (1 source, 1 point)

1c. Precipitation (2 sources, 2 points)

1d. Wind Speed (2 sources, 2 points)

Explanation / Answer

Answer

Instruments always have both systematic and random errors.

a)Random Errors:-These errors are very easy to deal with because they cause the measurements to deviate around the true value.

b)Systematic errors:- These can be more difficult to track and is always unknown. This error is also known as bias in the measurement.

1a. Temperature:- Errors take place due to the presence of temperature gradients, drafts, sensor nonlinearities, poor thermal contact, calibration drifts, radiant energy and sensor self heating.

1b. Humidity:- Prominent Relative Humidity readings, due to inadequate time to complete cooling effect of evaporation from cotton wick. Contamination of the cotton wick is responsible for inaccurate measurement of the wet-bulb temperature. For sling psychrometers, there is one common error because if two people will "sling" a psychrometer in the same way, the readings can be incompatible.

1c.Precipitation:- There are some causes of Errors in Non-Recording Gauge- some water is used to wet the surface of instrument, the rain recorded may be less than the real rainfall due to the direction of the rainfall deviated by wind, cavities in the collector and tube may also cause error. Decrease of water due to evaporation can also occur.

1d. Wind Speed:- Instruments are usually intended to measure values only within a certain range. A cup anemometer that measures wind speed has a maximum rate in which it can spin and thus there is a limit on the maximum wind speed it can compute. In some other cup anemometers, their mass cannot detect small wind speeds.

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