About Windfinders

Windfinders offers sodar assessment, leasing and maintenance services to the wind energy industry.

More and more prospective wind energy projects are being required to take sodar measurements of their wind regimes. Sodar's proven capability to measure the wind profile and provide shear exponents above the met tower are becoming critical inputs to plant output projections. Windfinders has the experience and technology to meet the new demand.

What is sodar?
Sodar is an acronym for sonic detection and ranging. It's used to take a very high-resolution measurement of the wind profile above an assessment site. A sodar system measures speed and direction of the volume of wind blowing above it, up to 140 meters or 460 feet.

For a wind developer or financial institution, sodar provides data up to hub height and beyond the swept area of modern turbine rotor spans. Sodar also provides a clearer picture of the wind regime thus reducing the risk related to overestimation due to met tower extrapolation.

Sodar for complex terrains.
Sodar is essential for measuring the wind profile in complex terrains that vary in surface roughness.

A number of case studies presented by AWS Truewind, LLC.at the 2003 American Wind Energy Association Conference showed substantial differences in wind profiles from measured sodar data and extrapolated met-tower data.

How it works.
Sodar systems measure the wind profile by emitting audible pulses in three directions. As the sound propagates through the atmosphere it is scattered by small changes in air density and some of the emitted sound is returned to the sodar. The change in the received frequency from the transmit frequency is known as the Doppler shift and that shift is proportional to observed wind speeds and their directions. The following link offers more detail on the underlying technology of sodar. www.sodar.com/about_sodar.htm