An Objective Analysis of Wind Data for Energy Budget Studies

An objective technique for adjusting wind data, such that the total mass divergence in a volume of the atmosphere is zero, is developed. The adjustment is obtained by applying a least-squares smoothing with a Lagrangian multiplier to constrain the total mass divergence to a specified amount. The computational details are derived and the method is applied to several examples. Both for theoretical wind profiles and for actual data, a very satisfactory adjustment is achieved without destroying the physical information contained in the data.