16ENERGY An Adaptive System for Detecting Rotor Layer Turbulence Using Edge Computing

Developing lidar scan strategies for field campaigns often involves a delicate balance between addressing the primary science goals of the field campaign while being able to capture specific events of interest to scientists. For the U.S. Department of Energy’s Wind Forecast Improvement Project 3 (WFIP3), the operational lidar strategies are geared to providing coastal wind statistics geared towards improving NOAA’s operational High Resolution Rapid Refresh (HRRR) wind forecasts. However, these operational strategies may not necessarily capture all the necessary characteristics of winds offshore at hub height, particularly during extreme conditions with strong vertical wind shear and large spatial variability. To be able to capture the spatial variability of such extremes operationally, additional labor involves forecasting the weather phenomena in advance and then manually altering the lidar’s scan strategy. In this talk, we present how we leverage Argonne National Laboratory’s Waggle edge computer to automatically steer a Halo Photonics XR+ Doppler lidar installed at a coastal site near Nantucket, MA. The Waggle node automatically triggers advanced scans to improve the characterization of a targeted phenomena. Using the Waggle infrastructure, we develop a software plugin that automatically calculates vertical wind profiles from the Doppler lidar’s Velocity Azimuth Display scans then triggers a stacked sector scan in the direction of the low level jet. We successfully tested this system for two multi-day time periods during May 2024. The stacked sector scans show a sharp gradient in vertical wind shear and horizontal wind speed near the southern coast of Nantucket which would not be visible under the operational WFIP3 strategy (which is continuous profiling mode). Furthermore, the automated nature of this system provides essential three-dimensional data necessary to characterize key atmospheric phenomena of interest for wind energy, while also maintaining the operational scan strategy during other time periods.