Terrain-influenced wind flow of the Qitai radio telescope site

The wind environment of a site is one of the important factors affecting the observation performance of large aperture and high-performance radio telescopes. Exploring the relationship between the effects of different terrains on wind flow is important to optimize the wind environment of the site. The terrain of the Qitai radio telescope (QTT) site located in east Tianshan Mountains at an elevation of about 1800 m was used to study the wind flow in the adjacent zone of antenna based on numerical simulation. The area from 600m south to 600m north of the antenna is defined as the antenna adjacent zone, and three groups of boundaries with different terrains are set up upstream and downstream, respectively. Since the zone where the antenna is located is a slope terrain, in order to verify the influence of terrain on the wind flow and to clarify the relationship between the influence of boundary terrain on the wind flow, a control group of horizontal terrain is constructed. The simulation results show that the wind flow is mainly influenced by the terrain. The highest elevation of the upstream and downstream boundary terrains affects the basic wind speed. The upstream boundary terrain has a greater impact on wind flow than the downstream boundary terrain. In addition, the wind speed profile index obtained by numerical simulation is smaller than the actual index for the wind from south. Therefore, the wind speed at the upper level (about 100 m) obtained by inversion based on the measured wind speed at the bottom (about 10 m) is also smaller than the actual wind speed.