The lack of observations at heights relevant to the wind energy industry is a major challenge for the development of the next generation offshore wind turbines expected to operate within the first tens kilometres from the coast with turbine tip reaching more than 250 m. Observations in the coastal zone, complex by its very nature as being the site of sea breezes, low-level jets, land/sea transition, are key for both understanding the marine atmospheric boundary layer processes interacting with the turbine and to the parametrization of the wind profile well above the surface layer. These needs face the difficulties of measuring in the region 150–500 m and above the sea surface. In this paper, we present an original methodology to measure the 10-min averaged wind profile at 1.5 km offshore using a scanning doppler LiDAR (Light Detection And Ranging) installed inland. The validated methodology provides a well resolved vertical profile of the horizontal wind speed and direction up to 500 m above the sea. The methodology is implemented in a 7 month test campaign in the northeastern Atlantic coast. The analysis of the wind conditions shows a proportion of low-level jets, whose origin is discussed, of 15.5 % mainly coming from land and at night with a core well inside the rotor area of a 10 MW wind turbine. Wind shear events above the design values are observed 30 % of the time and provide a third of the total power production. High shear events are shown to be more probable during low-level jet (68 % of the time) compared to non low-level jet events (22 %). The description of low-level jets and high shear events is key as they are situations where the wind profile differs from the standard values used for wind turbine design and may affect the load and fatigue predictions.