| 17 Sep 2025
Improving Wind Speed Availability of a Six-Beam Doppler Lidar
Abstract. A simple adaptive variant of the Doppler Beam Swinging (DBS) method is presented to enhance the availability of wind velocity measurements in profiling lidars. The adaptive method dynamically selects beams with sufficient signal-to-noise ratios (SNR) for wind velocity reconstruction, instead of the standard approach, which discards a complete scan when one beam falls below the SNR threshold. The adaptive method was validated in two measurement campaigns at the Østerild wind turbine test field in Denmark using three BEAM 6x profiling lidars from Lumibird. In the first campaign, a lidar measured up to 500 m in proximity to a meteorological mast; in the second campaign, the first lidar was replaced by two other lidar units to increase the maximum measurement range up to 1 km. Validation against cup anemometers and wind vanes at four different heights of the met mast showed excellent agreement for mean wind speed and wind direction, with results similar to those from the standard approach. Availability assessments indicated improvements for all three lidars at high altitudes, showing a maximum increment of 16.9 percentage points over the standard approach. Due to its simplicity, the adaptive method can be implemented in lidar software without requiring any hardware modifications.
Competing interests: JM holds a chief editor position in the Wind Energy Science (WES) journal. MM, GL, and GG are employed by Lumibird SA.
Publisher's note: Copernicus Publications remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims made in the text, published maps, institutional affiliations, or any other geographical representation in this paper. While Copernicus Publications makes every effort to include appropriate place names, the final responsibility lies with the authors. Views expressed in the text are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher.
