A Review of Progress and Applications of Pulsed Doppler Wind LiDARs

Abstract

Doppler wind LiDAR (Light Detection And Ranging) makes use of the principle of optical Doppler shift between the reference and backscattered radiations to measure radial velocities at distances up to several kilometers above the ground. Such instruments promise some advantages, including its large scan volume, movability and provision of 3-dimensional wind measurements, as well as its relatively higher temporal and spatial resolution comparing with other measurement devices. In recent decades, Doppler LiDARs developed by scientific institutes and commercial companies have been well adopted in several real-life applications. Doppler LiDARs are installed in about a dozen airports to study aircraft-induced vortices and detect wind shears. In the wind energy industry, the Doppler LiDAR technique provides a promising alternative to in-situ techniques in wind energy assessment, turbine wake analysis and turbine control. Doppler LiDARs have also been applied in meteorological studies, such as observing boundary layers and tracking tropical cyclones. These applications demonstrate the capability of Doppler LiDARs for measuring backscatter coefficients and wind profiles. In addition, Doppler LiDAR measurements show considerable potential for validating and improving numerical models. It is expected that future development of the Doppler LiDAR technique and data processing algorithms will provide accurate measurements with high spatial and temporal resolutions under different environmental conditions.

Parameterization of Wind Evolution using Lidar

“…The measurement principle of Doppler wind lidar is explained in many publications (see e.g. Weitkamp, 2005;Peña et al, 2013;Liu et al, 2019) and thus is not introduced here in detail. https://doi.org/10.5194/wes-2020-50 Preprint.…”

LiSBOA: LiDAR Statistical Barnes Objective Analysis for optimal design of LiDAR scans and retrieval of wind statistics. Part I: Theoretical framework

“…Wind speed has been traditionally measured through local sensors, such as mechanical, sonic, and hot-wire anemometers (Liu et al, 2019;Kunkel and Marusic, 2006). Besides their simplicity, mechanical anemometers are affected by errors due to the flow distortion of the supporting structures and harsh weather conditions (e.g.…”

“…Besides the mentioned capabilities, LiDARs present some important limitations, such as reduced range in adverse weather conditions (precipitations, heavy rain or low aerosol concentration) (Liu et al, 2019) and a limited spatio-temporal resolution of this instrument, namely about 20 meters in the radial direction and about 10 Hz in sampling frequency. These technical specifications, associated with the non-stationary wind conditions typically encountered for field experiments, pose major challenges to apply wind LiDARs for the statistical analysis of turbulent atmospheric flows.…”

Fast dual‐doppler LiDAR retrieval of boundary layer wind profiles

“…due to urban planning and height restrictions), remote sensing instruments have proven to be a convenient and reliable means of estimating the vertical wind profile within the boundary layer (Tse et al, 2013). In particular, the coherent doppler LiDAR (light detection and ranging) has been used in many observational studies and field campaigns in different parts of the world (Barlow et al, 2011;Liu et al, 2019). For single doppler LiDAR scans, there are various methods and techniques for obtaining the vertical wind profile.…”