Applying motion compensation to offshore wind lidar reconstructed wind measurements

Abstract

Floating lidar systems present an effective and advantageous solution for offshore wind speed measurements, providing wind speed and direction data at multiple heights with easy deployment to provide widespread wind information around an area. One of the causes of apprehension, however, concerns buoy motion which induces overestimations of turbulence intensity and potentially imprecise measurements of horizontal wind speed. This research aims to reduce this uncertainty by applying motion compensation to three wind field reconstruction techniques (scalar, vector, and hybrid) to assess the amelioration on horizontal wind speed and turbulence intensity; especially how motion compensation can improve scalar and hybrid outputs. A three-month dataset of a floating lidar system (FLS) was compared to a nearby fixed lidar. The results demonstrate that motion compensation provides an improvement for horizontal wind speed measurement but inflates the overestimation of turbulence intensity from the floating lidar system. Though scalar reconstruction measurements provide slightly more accurate data compared to hybrid reconstructed measurements, motion compensation helps limit the bias disparity; ergo, applying motion compensation reduces the differences in bias for scalar and hybrid reconstructed measurements. This study results in two conclusions. Basic motion compensation provides a notable amelioration for horizontal wind speed FLS measurements, yet further research must be conducted to find a suitable method to improve turbulence intensity. Additionally, the scalar reconstruction method still slightly outperforms hybrid reconstruction in offshore measurement results, but motion compensation aids in limiting the differences between the two.