Fraunhofer IWES has successfully finished the validation of their Wind Lidar Buoy. An offshore verification test was performed for and with the Fraunhofer IWES Wind Lidar Buoy now equipped with a ZephIR 300 Lidar next to the FINO1 met mast, in the German North Sea about 45 kilometres north of the East Frisian island Borkum.
Both the availability and the accuracy of the floating lidar system were assessed against the offshore test site which was set up as a lidar-mast comparison adhering to IEC 61400-12-1 ed.2 CD where wind measurements from the lidar and the mast are compared with each other for different corresponding height levels and reference conditions. The Fraunhofer IWES Wind Lidar Buoy is a floating lidar with a fully encapsulated, well-protected and integrated ZephIR 300 wind lidar device combined with a reliable power supply strategy and an in-house developed motion correction algorithm. Results of the trial demonstrate that the Fraunhofer IWES system based on the ZephIR 300 lidar delivers excellent correlations and extremely high data availability when compared to a traditional tall met mast structure.