SAR-based wind fields over offshore wind farms — A valuable tool for planning, monitoring and optimization

The number of offshore wind facilities is increasing with a proportionate decline in fossil and nuclear power production. The study of turbulent wakes inside a turbine cluster is a very important topic in order to optimize cluster layout for power production. With an increasing density of wind farms in the exclusive economic zone (EEZ) of a country, shadowing effects of wind farms on adjacent clusters are becoming an important issue for wind farm performance and need to be investigated to improve power harvest predictions. We present a comparative study of wind fields of different resolutions and coverages derived from TerraSAR-X and Sentinel-1 images. We elucidate the benefits of certain data for particular applications.