EGU24-7587, updated on 08 Mar 2024
https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu24-7587
EGU General Assembly 2024
© Author(s) 2024. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Replacement of meteorological towers with ground-based remote-remote sensing sodars: How close are we? 

Ebba Dellwik1, Sten-Ove Rodén2, Johan Arnqvist3, Mikael Sjöholm1, Corinna Möhrlen4, and Andre Gräsman2
Ebba Dellwik et al.
  • 1Wind and Energy Systems Department, Technical University of Denmark, Roskilde, Denmark (ebde@dtu.dk)
  • 2AQ System AB, Stockholm, Sweden
  • 3Department of Earth Science, Uppsala University, Sweden
  • 4WEPROG - Weather & Energy PROGnoses, Assens, Denmark

As wind turbines have grown in size, it has become ever more costly to make the necessary tower-based wind observations needed both for the pre-operation (siting) phase and for wind turbine operations. In response to this challenge, the wind energy scientific community has - over the last decades - focused on evaluating and improving ground-based remote-sensing technology. The development has often been done in close collaboration with the innovative companies dedicated to providing the new solutions for replacing the expensive meteorological towers to the market.

The project EARS4WindEnergy, which started in March 2023, represents one such effort. The project is focused on a re-exploration of the sodar technology, which preceded the later focus on wind lidars. Here, we present a benchmarking of the AQ510 sodar equipped with new signal processing technology with tall-tower data focusing on the three “must-perform” criteria of accurate wind speed, accurate turbulence intensity and a reliable identification of erroneous data. The complementary aspects of data availability and robustness in relation to current wind lidars is also discussed. Most of the presented data are taken at the Østerild test site in Northern Denmark, where a 244m tall tower allows for accuracy quantification over most of the sodar’s measurement range.

How to cite: Dellwik, E., Rodén, S.-O., Arnqvist, J., Sjöholm, M., Möhrlen, C., and Gräsman, A.: Replacement of meteorological towers with ground-based remote-remote sensing sodars: How close are we? , EGU General Assembly 2024, Vienna, Austria, 14–19 Apr 2024, EGU24-7587, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu24-7587, 2024.