Comment on wes-2022-40

Abstract

Ship-based lidar measurements from the NEWA Ferry Lidar Experiment have been used together with ERA5 and numerical data from the NEWA wind atlas to analyze low-level jets over the Southern Baltic Sea with the following main objectives: (1) to evaluate the performance of ship-mounted lidar observations to investigate low-level jet properties along the region covered by the ship track and (2) to compare these observations with numerical simulations to better understand their capacities and limitations in retrieving the characteristics of this mesoscale phenomenon. Most in situ measurement devices can only retrieve wind characteristics in a fixed location. However, the findings of this study show that the non-stationary nature of ship-based lidar systems allows them to capture the variability of the jets' characteristics due to both temporal and spatial effects. The models struggle with accurately capturing the jet features, although they can properly identify their trend in the different locations along the ship track. The found results are strongly influenced by the characteristics of the observations, such as the data availability or the profile height limitation, as well as by the features of the jets, with a particular relevance of core height and fall-off. Additionally, the results illustrate the temporal and spatial shift between the jets detected by the measurements and the models and the potential benefit of considering such deviations when studying low-level jets' climatology through numerical modes.