Assessing Sodar Performance in a High-Wind Coastal Environment: Insights from the Nantucket site at WFIP3

The third Wind Forecast Improvement Project (WFIP3) is a U.S. DOE sponsored 5-year initiative that is focused on enhancing wind energy forecasting in offshore and coastal regions through improved model physics and data assimilation. The project includes comprehensive multi-seasonal field observations with a deployment strategy that features both marine and land-based sites to capture a detailed sampling of the vertical structure of the marine atmospheric boundary layer under a wide range of meteorological conditions.

One of the key land-based sites is located at the Nantucket Wastewater Treatment Facility, about 100 m from the shoreline, where a Scintec MFAS sodar system has been operational since December, 2023, providing high vertical resolution measurements of wind and turbulence in the lower atmosphere. We present an analysis of the sodar’s performance over several seasons, focusing on its effectiveness in measuring wind profiles in a coastal environment characterized by complex atmospheric dynamics. High wind conditions at the site introduce noise into the acoustic measurements, amplified by breaking waves, which can compromise the detection range of this instrument. We investigate post-processing techniques using the raw moments data to filter out noise, improve the reliability and the detection range of the wind measurements, in comparison with the wind profiles from a co-located Doppler lidar during its continuous VAD operation mode. This work contributes to more robust data for WFIP3 modeling and forecasting and provides insights into the operational performance and potential improvements for acoustic remote sensing technologies in challenging coastal environments overall.