A Survey of Ultrasonic Anemometers

Our research center has successfully developed and deployed OceanNet, a novel high-speed communication infrastructure for marine fishermen which has a range of 60-70 km from the shore. We plan to use this network for coastal oceanography and weather monitoring by installing an IoT of low-cost weather stations equipped with multiple sensors on fishing vessels. Towards this, we are developing a suite of low-cost and yet feature rich sensors. Ultrasonic anemometer is one such sensor. A survey of the commercially available anemometers revealed that they are too expensive for our use and also not fully featured to meet our requirements. Various research prototypes were also surveyed to get a realistic assessment of the price point and the feature set that we can target for our prototype. This work presents a detailed account of the survey of the available anemometers with a comparison of their key parameters.