Offshore Doppler Wind LiDAR Assessment of Atmospheric Stability

This paper tackles atmospheric stability typing using a Zephyr™ 300 offshore Doppler Wind Lidar in the context of its progressive acceptance in the offshore wind-energy industry. The lidar-retrieved wind-shear exponent, which is used as a proxy atmospheric stability, is compared against the wind-shear exponent and the potential temperature gradient both retrieved from reference metmast. A total sample of 4319 measurements is analysed from IJmuiden's test campaign, in the North Sea, from April 1
_st
to 30
_th
, 2015. Concerning stability typing, both lidar- and metmast-derived wind-shear indicators overestimated by 4% and 14%, respectively, the most frequent atmospheric stability case, which was convective (48% of the cases) according to the potential temperature reference indicator.