Experimental evaluation of a model for the influence of coherent wind lidars on their remote measurements of atmospheric boundary-layer turbulence

Affordable coherent wind lidars based on modern telecom components have recently emerged on the wind energy market spurred by high demand of the industry for compact and accurate remote sensing wind and turbulence profilers. Today, hundreds of ground based wind lidars that achieve the range resolution by either focusing a continuous-wave laser beam or by gating a pulsed laser beam are used for measuring mean wind and turbulence profiles in the lower atmospheric boundary-layer. However, detailed understanding of the influence of the spatial filtering of the lidars on their precise assessment of turbulence is still a challenge. For assessment of the fine structure turbulence, and in particular for the easy and fast assessment of the dissipation rate of turbulent kinetic energy from measurements in the Kolmogorov inertial subrange, we havemodeled the atmospheric velocity structure functions and spectra obtainable from fixed-orientation along-beam wind measurements by these lidars. The dissipation rate retrieval model is experimentally evaluated with data obtained with a pulsed lidar pointing horizontally into horizontally homogeneous turbulence encountered at the top level of a 125 m tall meteorological tower, equipped with an in-situ turbulence measurement device (a three-dimensional sonic anemometer) for intercomparison. Our experimental study has revealed that the easily manageable analytical model accounts well for the observed fine structure turbulent spectra and their dependence on the pointing direction of the lidar beam relative to the mean wind direction. The results demonstrate that turbulence dissipation rates, and hence boundary-layer turbulence, can easily be obtained from wind lidar-based fine structure measurements.