Onshore Wind Acceleration Across the Indian River Lagoon

A study of the onshore across the Indian River Lagoon (east central Florida) was conducted during the summer of 2015. It was anticipated that the onshore flow would be higher along the ocean beach front than on the downwind side of the estuary. The flow of winds, though, was observed to greater on the downwind location than beachside. The working hypothesis is that the surface roughness (z0) in the oceanic nearshore is effectively higher than across the over the Inidan River Lagoon. The field observations, for assessing the wind field and roughness lengths, include a wind lidar, a 10 m wind sensor and a wind monitor deployed on a pontoon boat. Winds were converted to 'potential wind' using measured surface roughness to test the hypothesis that roughness adjustments could account for the wind variation. In addition, the WRF (Weather Research Forecasting) was run with high spatial resolution in an attempt to duplicate the observations. Results of this study are consistent with the working hypothesis.