Field test of a lidar wind profiler

Atmospheric eddies, which have slightly different properties than their environment and are believed to be transported by the wind (Taylor's hypothesis), are used as tracers for remote wind measurements with a fast incoherent lidar. Horizontal measurements, parallel with the wind, have shown that the atmospheric structures can be traced in space and time and that the horizontal wind speed can be determined from a set of subsequent measurements. Also, the characteristic size and life time of the strucutres were inverted from the lidar system with their axes pointing in slightly different horizontal directions. Using the cross-correlation technique, the wind vector was derived from the geometry of the sysetm and the transient times of the structures crossing the two lidar field-of-views. The measured wind vectors are comparable with the in-situ measured wind vector. The same technique was applied to measure the vertical profile of the wind vector using a single lidar in the triangulation mode using fast adjustable platform pointing subsequently in three different (azimuth and elevation) directions. The wind vector could be measured to altitudes of about 1 km and were in agreement with the in-situ measured data from sensors on a 200 m high meteo mast and from data provided by a Doppler sodar