Offshore Doppler Wind LiDAR assessment of atmospheric stability

This paper tackles atmospheric stability typing using a Zephyr™ 300 offshore Doppler Wind Lidar in the context of its progressive acceptance in the offshore wind-energy industry. The lidar-retrieved wind-shear exponent, which is used as a proxy atmospheric stability, is compared against the wind-shear exponent and the potential temperature gradient both retrieved from reference metmast. A total sample of 4319 measurements is analysed from IJmuiden's test campaign, in the North Sea, from April 1 st to 30 th, 2015. Concerning stability typing, both lidar- and metmast-derived wind-shear indicators overestimated by 4% and 14%, respectively, the most frequent atmospheric stability case, which was convective (48% of the cases) according to the potential temperature reference indicator.
This work was supported via Spanish Government–European Regional Development Funds project PGC2018-094132-B-I00 and EU H2020 ACTRIS-2 (GA 654109). The European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT), KIC InnoEnergy project NEPTUNE (Offshore Metocean Data Measuring Equipment and Wind, Wave and Current Analysis and Forecasting Software, call FP7) supported measurements campaigns. CommSensLab is a María-de-Maeztu Unit of Excellence funded by the Agencia Estatal de Investigacion (Spanish National Science Foundation) that also funded the project MDM-2016-0600-18-1. Spanish NSF (Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities; Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovacion y Universidades) for doctoral grant PRE2018-086054 hold by Ph.D. student Araujo da Silva M.P. at CommSensLab-UPC.
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