The NEWA Ferry Lidar Experiment: Measuring mesoscalewinds in the Southern Baltic Sea

Abstract

This article presents the Ferry Lidar Experiment, which is one of the NEWA Experiments, a set of unique flow experiments conducted as part of the New EuropeanWind Atlas (NEWA) project. These experiments have been prepared and conducted to create adequate datasets for mesoscale and microscale model validation. For the Ferry Lidar Experiment a Doppler lidar instrument was placed on a ferry connecting Kiel and Klaipeda in the Southern Baltic Sea from February to June 2017. A comprehensive set of all relevant motions was recorded together with the lidar data and processed in order to obtain and provide corrected wind time series. Due to the existence of the motion effects, the obtained data are essentially different from typical on-site data used for wind resource assessments in the wind industry. First comparisons show that they can be well related to mapped wind trajectories from the output of a numerical weather prediction model showing a reasonable correlation. More detailed validation studies are planned for the future.