Thursday, January 4, 2018

Easy wet bulb temperature determination

People have been searching on the Internet for an easy way to calculate wet bulb temperature (and so have I). Experts give various long calculations and I wanted an accurate value easily calculated. I had a lot of trouble searching on various forums and eventually found a site that uses an equation that can be solved numerically that gives me an accurate answer, but the formula did not work unless I changed the P units from hectopascals to atmospheres. So instead of 1000 hPa I use 1000/1013.25. I solve numerically using a computer program I wrote to get Tw (wet bulb temperature). The formula is at
and I notice that P is included in one equation and left out in the next equation. However if you use atm it should work well with P included in both. The formula gives RH, but you can find Tw numerically. Say you are trying to find the wet bulb temperature for Td=45 deg C and RH=67%. Then let RHS=formula given and start with Tw=45 (represents RH=100%) and decrease Tw iteratively until RHS<=67. Find Tw at that point.

You can use a wet bulb calculator to check how accurate the above formula is (pretty good).
Your inputs into the program will be Td, RH and P. (P in atm). (Td is dry bulb T and Tw is wet bulb T.)

Code in Pascal:
Tw:=Td;
repeat
Tw:=Tw-0.001;
A:=611.2*exp(17.502*Tw/(240.97+Tw))-66.8745*(1+0.00115*Tw)*P*(Td-Tw);
B:=6.112*exp(17.502*Td/(240.97+Td));
RHS:=A/B;
until (RHS<=rh);

{Now print Tw}

No comments:

Post a Comment