Anemometer beam exits reflect, or backscatter, the light back into a detector, where it is measured relative to the original laser beam. When the particles are in great motion, they produce a Doppler shift for measuring wind speed in the laser light, which is used to calculate the speed of the particles, and therefore the air around the anemometer. Ultrasonic anemometers, first developed in the 1950s, use ultrasonic sound waves to measure wind velocity. They measure wind speed based on the time of flight of sonic pulses between pairs of transducers. Measurements from pairs of transducers can be combined to yield
Anemometer cups and arms, and may have a value between two and a little over three. Every previous experiment involving an anemometer had to be repeated after the error was discovered. The three-cup anemometer developed by the Canadian John Patterson in 1926 and subsequent cup improvements by Brevoort & Joiner of the United States in 1935 led to a cupwheel design with a nearly linear response and had an error of less than 3% up to . Patterson found that each cup produced maximum torque when it was at 45° to the wind flow. The three-cup anemometer also had a more