Coastal wind study based on Sentinel-1 and ground-based scanning lidar

Winds in the coastal zone have importance for near-shore wind farm planning. Recently the Danish Energy Agency gave new options for placing offshore wind farms much closer to the coastlines than previously. The new tender areas are located from 3 to 8 km from the coast. Ground-based scanning lidar located on land can partly cover this area out to around 15 km. In order to improve wind farm planning for near-shore coastal areas, the project‘Reducing the Uncertainty of Near-shore Energy estimates from meso- and micro-scale wind models’ (RUNE) is established. The measurement campaign starts October 2015 and has 3-month duration at the Danish North Sea coast at around 56.5°N, 8.2°E.
Ocean surface winds derived from Sentinel-1 will be compared to the ground-based scanning lidar observations of winds as well as to winds observed at the coastline, at a floating wind lidar buoy and at a wave buoy. The various observation types have advantages and limitations; one advantage of both the Sentinel-1 and the scanning lidar is that they both observe wind fields covering a large area and so can be combined for studying the spatial variability of winds. Sentinel-1 are being processed near-real-time at DTU Wind Energy (Badger et al. 2016) using GFS winds as input. Wind direction can be checked from the various other observations. Sensitivity to possible deviations in wind directions in the near-shore area will be investigated. Furthermore, oceanic features not related to winds but to e.g. surface current, breaking waves, etc. will be investigated. The plan is to establish high-quality coastal wind speed cases based on Sentinel-1 for quantification of the coastal winds, for verification of wind resource modelling best practices in the coastal zone.
The study is supported by RUNE and New European Wind Atlas projects and satellite data from Copernicus Sentinel-1.