Design and experimental research of a temperature sensor applied to surface air temperature monitoring

•An airflow deflector is proposed to enhance air circulation.•A CFD method is employed to quantify the radiation error of the sensor.•A MLP network is used to form a universal radiation error correction method.•The radiation error of the sensor may be reduced to 0.1 °C.•The error is 1–2 orders of magnitude lower than the same sensors without correction. Due to the solar radiation effect, current air temperature sensors may produce a radiation error that is on the order of 1 °C. In this paper, a temperature sensor with a new structure is proposed. Initially, a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) method is employed to quantify the radiation errors for the sensor under various environmental conditions. Then, a radiation error correction method is obtained by using a multi-layer perceptron (MLP) network. Finally, air temperature observation experiments are performed. The experimental results demonstrate that the mean radiation error is 0.07 °C. The mean absolute error (MAE), root mean square error (RMSE) and correlation coefficient (r) between the calculated radiation errors and the measured radiation errors are 0.027 °C, 0.034 °C, and 0.443, respectively.