An Application of the Flux-gate Magnetometer to Measuring the Wind Direction

Abstract

Wind directions measured by the conventional anemometers are referred to a fixed direction, which must be determined somehow by referring to the geomagnetic field or the rotational axis of the earth. In this paper, we describe a newly designed anemoscope that measures the absolute wind direction by using the flux-gate magnetometer. The principle of the measuring system is based on the fact that the flux-gate magnetometer can measure very low geomagnetic field magnitudes by using the chopper-amplifier principle.