Estimation of LiDAR error over complex terrain covered with forest using numerical tools

Abstract

Since a few years, a new wind measurement instrument has been competing with standard cup anemometers: the LiDAR. The performances of this instrument over complex terrain are still a matter of debate and this is mainly due to the flow homogeneity assumption made by the instrument. In this work, the error caused by this hypothesis was evaluated with the help of OpenFOAM 1.7, MeteoDyn WT 4.0 and WAsP Engineering for a LiDAR deployed on a complex site covered with dense forest. The assessment of the CFD model firstly revealed the significant impact of both the location and nature of the inlet boundary condition. Despite the presence of terrain complexity within a radius of 340 m around the remote sensor, an averaged error of less than 3% was observed, suggesting that the LiDAR is only affected by topographic variations in the immediate vicinity of the scanned volume. © 2014 AFM, EDP Sciences.