An investigation into the capabilities of remote scanning lidars to measure wind turbulence was recently conducted as part of a collaboration between SgurrEnergy, the University of Oklahoma and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
SgurrEnergy’s remote sensing device, Galion Lidar, was used to gather the measurements at the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement site (ARM) in northern Oklahoma, USA. Alongside a selection of other measurement devices, Galion Lidar was deployed to measure using a tri-doppler technique to calculate zonal, meridional and vertical wind speed components every second so that the mean wind speed and turbulence statistics could be calculated. The comparison of device results showed that the tri-doppler technique, conducted by Galion, recorded larger variances in mean wind speeds and measured small scales of turbulence which were not picked up by a standard lidar scanning strategy.
