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. SAR wind retrievals give uniquely detailed spatial information on offshore wind fields. Wind maps can be retrieved from SAR observations at resolutions finer than 1 km. The high resolution make SAR images suitable for wind retrievals in the coastal zone, but the Geophysical Model Functions (GMF) for the wind retrieval are tuned for open sea conditions [1]. DTU routinely retrieves SAR wind fields from the Sentinel-1A satellite using APL/NOAA’s SAROPS system with GFS model wind directions as input. For the presented cases CMOD5.n is used. Ground-based scanning lidar located on land can also cover near shore areas. 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) was established. The lidar measurement campaign started November 2015 and ended in February 2016 at the Danish North Sea coast at around 56.5 ◦N, 8.2 ◦E. 107 satellite SAR scenes were collected during the same period.