Sodar - NREL Scintec MFAS Wind Profiler, Decker Ranch Airstrip - Raw Data

**Overview**

The dataset includes 15-minute average wind speed and direction records from 30 m to 330 m above ground level (AGL) in 10-m range gates. Data were collected by a Scintec MFAS wind profiler installed at the Decker Ranch in Oregon, about 4.4 km southeast of Kent, Ore., and are intended for validating WFIP2 model improvements.

**Data Details**

Instrument location:
* N 45°09'54.42" (N 45.165117)
* W120°39'20.87" (W 120.655799)

Instrument clock and computer system time set to UTC.

**Data Quality**

The Scintec MFAS wind profiler instrument installed at the Decker Ranch is capable of measuring at heights up to 1000 m. For this study, the maximum height was set to 330 m. The instrument was oriented to true north, so no corrections to the wind direction should be made. Scintec wind profilers come with the APRun software package, which performs data collection and quality control (QC), among other functions. Version 1.46 of APRun was used in this study.

The APRun manual states:
*The primary results are checked against local signal quality criteria, combined signal quality criteria and two-dimensional spatial/temporal consistency tests. Any data that does not pass all quality control tests is devalidated and removed*.

Devalidation means replacing the value with an error value, usually a series of ?9?s, such as 99.99 or 999.99. Not all devalidated data are actually removed from the *.mnd files, so the user must filter them out. There are some error flags that indicate the type of error, but these are not included in the *.mnd files, and we have no access to them.

Because QC already has been performed by APRun, our QC procedures consisted of removing samples with error values and performing a visual inspection of the data to see if larger patterns indicated any kind of problem.

There are 623 gaps of two hours or less and 61 gaps of more than two hours. The longest gap is 15.31 days, from 2016-12-07 03:00Z to 2016-12-22 10:30Z. All gaps that exceed two hours are listed in file: Decker_Ranch_gaps.txt.