Can Wakes be Accurately Characterized in Complex Terrain?

As part of the second Wind Forecast Improvement Project (WFIP2) field campaign, a large suite of instrumentation was deployed to the Columbia River Gorge in October 2015. The array included two scanning Doppler lidars deployed by the Chemical Sciences Division, NOAA. At the end of the WFIP2 campaign, the scanning Doppler lidar in Arlington, OR was tasked with measuring the wakes from the wind farm a few kilometers to the west of the site.

To characterize the wakes, the scanning Doppler lidar performed a closely spaced stack of conical sectors centered on the wind turbines of interest. This measurement was performed for a period of two weeks. In this presentation, measurements of the wakes and heterogeneous flow around the wind turbines will be discussed. The challenges in characterizing wakes in complex terrain will be presented along with possible techniques to filter out the terrain effects and observe the wake characteristics.