General comments

The manuscript WES-2024-18 investigates the impact of the operating configuration and of the technical specifications of a scanning wind lidar on the measurement of complex wind flow. The focus is on quantifying biases in wind speed observations attributed to the speed and geometry of the scanning pattern used, as well as to the probe length and the spatial resolution of a wind lidar.  The investigation takes place using wind lidar observations, acquired in the context of the Perdigão experiment, which are coupled with a WRF-LES simulation. The article is well structured and written, has a good introduction of previous related studies and presents in a thorough way the analysis and the results of the study. I would like to congratulate the authors for that. However, it is difficult to identify what is the novelty of the study.

Please find below my specific comments and suggestions for minor corrections that intent to clarify the work presented in this manuscript. You will notice that most of my comments are minor. However, as I already mentioned the authors should emphasize on the new findings that this study presents. Furthermore, I have two minor comments that concern the whole manuscript. The authors use the terms “spatially resolved measurements” and the verb “interacts” (e.g. “the observation system interacts with the smaller spatial…”) in a way that can be confusing according to my opinion. I can understand the term “spatially distributed measurements”, but there is nothing resolved in the lidar measurements. The measurements provide spatially distributed observations of the radial speeds. Furthermore, there is no “interaction” between a wind lidar and the atmospheric wind since the wind characteristics are not distorted due to the operation of the wind lidar. I think that these two points should be clarified throughout the manuscript.

Specific comments

Pg.5 Line 81. What does it mean that in the archive the DLR lidars changed number and why is it relevant for the study.

Pg.8 Lines 132 - 134. Have the authors tried also other types of interpolations? And how sensitive are the conclusions of the study about the contribution to the error in the simulated lidar measurements due to the interpolation method used?

Pg.13 Line 288-289. What is the interpolated 2D wind field compared with? How are the “distortions” calculated?

Pg. 15 Figure 6. What does the solid black line represent?  

Pg. 16 Lines 323 – 324. Can the authors explain a bit more why they expect to see an elongation of the wake due to the probe volume? Isn’t this dependent on the magnitude of the wind sped gradient within the probe volume?

Minor corrections

Pg.2 Line 33. I suggest replacing “…to ensure robust returns,…” with “to ensure adequate backscattering signals…” or something similar.

Pg.2 Line 43. I suggest replacing “and virtual instrument…” with “and a virtual lidar…”

Pg.2 Figure 1. Is it possible to add the location of the tower tw13, since observations from that tower are presented in Fig. 2.

Pg.4 Line 70. Add the units of the gravitational acceleration.

Pg.4 Line 77. It is written: “the positions and scan configurations of the three Danish …” but as far as I understand only one wind lidar belongs to DTU. Can you please clarify this part.

Pg.5 Line 85. The word “cuts” could be replaced by the word “planes”.

Pg. 7 Line 122. Replace “off of” with “by”

Pg. 8 Line 145. Add “the” before “WindCube”

Pg. 10 Line 217. The symbol “w” in Eq. 9 is also used to denote the vertical component of the wind vector. I suggest replacing it with something else to avoid confusion.

Pg. 12 Line 231. Delete one “the” from “… in terms of the the …”

Pg. 13 Line 282. Is the probe length equal to 40 m or 44 m (as reported in Table 3)?

Pg. 16 Line 321. Is the (Fig. 7,4) correct?

Pg. 19 Line 365. Delete one “with” from “align with with”

References: Please check the information of the references is complete. Also, the Menke et al 2019b is reported twice.

Please see the attachment.