Assessment of 3-Dimensional Wind Retrievals Using Common-Volume, Temporally-Coordinated Triple Doppler Lidar Measurements Made During the XPIA Field Campaign

Knowledge of the three dimensional wind field is necessary to characterize wind farm inflows and to study turbine wakes. The measurement volumes and temporal update rates required to study these phenomena drive the need to make measurements of the 3-D wind field using observationally flexible remote sensing techniques. An important XPIA campaign goal was to develop and validate methods of making 3-D measurements of wind fields using multiple scanning Doppler Lidars. During the experiment we measured the 3-D wind field using three temporally coordinated scanning commercial Doppler Lidars. Measurements were made using several observational geometries: point, vertical profile, and horizontal 2-D array. In this presentation, we discuss the observations and evaluate the retrievals using co-located measurements from 3-D sonic anemometers mounted on the NOAA Boulder Atmospheric Observatory (BAO) 300m tower, wind profiling Doppler lidars, and a vertically pointed Doppler Lidar.