Wind Shear is a wind that suddenly changes in speed and/or direction.** I already discussed a lot about wind shear in my **previous post. One of the many tools that can detect wind shear is Doppler Radar. Doppler Radar utilizes the doppler effect to calculate the wind around it. But **what we will get is just a radial velocity (scalar, move away will resulting to < 0 value and the other hand for the wind that come closer will have a > 0 speed), not wind as a cartesian vector **(north-south, east-west, and up-down component). The usual wind shear formula is a vector operation. So how we detect or calculate wind shear using radar? We will discuss it here. We will use 1 of many wind shear radar products, HSHEAR.

HSHEAR Product

It’s sad we can’t get the actual vector of wind but we can still monitor the change of wind to detect the wind shear through radial velocity. The essence of wind shear is the change, remember. When we say “the change of wind”, we mean the change in spatial.

In mathematics, how to express changing in spatial? It is

Or the gradient of “the state” (in every dimension). The dimension we talk about in Horizontal Shear (HSHEAR) product is of course horizontal dimension (north-south and east-west) and “the state” is the radial velocity (Vr), so the equation become

Now we get the changing in every dimension. What we want to know is the magnitude of the change or how much the change of the wind is. It’s simple, it just the length of the vector.

#mathematics #data-science #weather #meteorology