Matador,
The effect of altitude on atmospheric pressure was discussed recently in the HVAC/R forum. See thread403-121661
Using the equation given there by quark (and confirmed by 25362) you can calculate that your atmospheric pressure at an altitude of 1620 ft (500m) will be 95.45 kPa abs.
Once you have the pressure you can plug it into the ideal gas equation (PV = nRT) and solve for density (= 1/V) as a function of temperature. This gives
Density (kg/m3) = 332.46 / T
where T is temperature in Kelvin
This will be very easy to put into a spreadsheet. If you want to check your numbers there is a gas density calculator that is part of the gas mass to volume converter built into Uconeer. This is a free engineering units conversion program available from
However, you must remeber that all these calculations are based on *dry* air. If you are doing calculations for a cooling tower your air will be wet, and the moisture content will be changing.
If you know the moisture content you could adjust the solution to the ideal gas law given above to take the varying molecular weight into account. Or let the spreadsheet do this for you.
Or you could just short-circuit the whole thing and download the free psychrometric calculator from