Impact of floating turbine motion on nacelle lidar turbulence measurements

Abstract

We determine the impact of floating turbine motion on turbulence measurements from a four-beam lidar by emulating its scanning configuration and retrievals within atmospheric turbulence boxes. Since the elevation angle of the lidar beams is small and the two bottom lidar beams point closely to the horizontal plane, we also evaluate the turbulence estimation abilities of a two-beam lidar. For the two-beam nacelle lidar, the variance of the individual beams is close to the target u-variance and closer than that we compute by reconstructing the u-velocity component with the two lidar beams radial velocities. By using floating turbine motion measurements from Hywind, we show that the floating turbine motion impacts turbulence estimations of the nacelle lidar. Roll does not have a clear impact on nacelle-lidar turbulence, whereas both the beam and the u-reconstructed variances increase with pitch amplitude.