New flexible retrieval for gusts and mean winds from Doppler wind lidars, tested for various scanning configurations

In the Field Experiment on Sub-Mesoscale Spatio-Temporal Variability in Lindenberg (FESSTVaL, www.fesstval.de) various phenomena in the atmospheric boundary layer are investigated. One goal is to detect wind gusts from measurements of a Doppler wind lidar (DWL). DWL’s allow the determination of wind vector profiles with a high vertical resolution (∼ 30 m) and therefore are an attractive alternative to metorological towers.

However, obtaining wind gusts from DWL measurements is not trivial because a monostatic lidar provides only a radial velocity, i.e., only one component of a three-dimensional vector per individual beam. Measurements in at least three linearly independent directions are therefore necessary to derive the wind vector. These must be performed sequentially, which prolongs the time interval for determining the wind vector and therefore limits the time resolution of the derived wind vector. In order to retrieve wind gusts, wind maxima of a few seconds, one needs to operate the instrument in a quick scanning mode. In this presentation, we show results from different scanning modes and discuss the method for retrieving wind gusts. We tested various configurations with respect to their ability to detect gusts and mean winds at the Boundary Layer Field Site in Falkenberg in autumn 2019. The DWL configurations that measure different lines-of-sight with rapid temporal repetitions have a lower signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) but the highest chance of detecting gusts.

We have developed a new retrieval method that skips prior SNR filtering and instead iteratively removes a fixed number of measurements that do not match a least-squares-fit. The least-squares-fit is then recalculated on the reduced set of measurements, and if necessary, this step is repeated. With appropriate retrieval steps and iteration criteria, our results suggest that prior filtering can be omitted.

We present the results of our new retrieval for eight different DWL configurations consisting of double-beam swinging, step-stare modes, and continuous-scanning modes. The evaluation is done by a comparison of the minimum, maximum and mean wind speed at 90 m a.g.l. against the reference measurements of a sonic anemometer that is located nearby. Ongoing work is addressing further comparison of our retrieved wind variables with unmanned aerial vehicles from the FESSTVaL campaign in summer 2020.