Triple Doppler wind lidars observations of atmospheric boundary layer during MATERHORN field project

The complexity of the atmospheric boundary layer over complex terrains poses a great challenge for observation and characterization. Recent advances in the technology of scanning Doppler wind lidar offers a promising way to remotely sense the wind field and its variation over the complex terrains. Three Doppler wind lidars from Army Research Laboratory, University of Notre Dame, and University of Utah, were deployed during the MATERHORN field observation to characterize the boundary layer wind field over a mountainous area in Utah. The advantage of using three scanning Doppler wind lidars is that the three wind components of wind vectors can be retrieved directly without making assumptions so that the observational results are more accurate and more robust than that derived from a single Doppler wind lidar. In this paper, we report some results from the three coordinated Doppler wind lidars. The lidar observed results are compared with tower sonic anemometer data compared both in time and spectral domains. Some difficulties and lessons learned from this experiment are also described.