Article: A quantitative comparison between traditional and line integral methods of derivative estimation

ABSTRACT

For diagnostic purposes, the "traditional" approach to estimating derivatives employs objective analysis to provide a gridded field from the original observations, which are typically not uniformly distributed in space. However, there exist other methods involving derivative estimation via line integral ("triangle") techniques that do not involve a prior mapping of the field onto a uniform grid. It has been suggested that these give improved results. Empirical testing of the differences between wind field derivative estimation using two different schemes is done with prototypical examples of the techniques. Test results verify that the triangle method indeed provides substantial ...