ADDLIDAR

The AWAKEN Dual-Doppler Lidar (ADDLIdar) experiment will be conducted in the context of the larger AWAKEN field campaign (https://www.nrel.gov/wind/awaken.html ). The American Wake experimeNt (AWAKEN) is an international, multi-institutional wind energy field campaign that is being conducted from May 2022 through September 2023, in the vicinity of the King Plains wind farm, approximately 25 km south of the ARM Southern Great Plains (SGP) Central Facility. The goal of AWAKEN is to provide observations to better understand both interactions between individual wind turbines within a farm, and interactions between the wind farm as a whole and the lower atmosphere.

The ADDLIdar campaign is one component of AWAKEN. It involves the deployment of two ARM scanning Doppler lidars to AWAKEN sites A4 (36.361894°, -97.356352°) and A7 (36.347259°, -97.389968°). From these positions the lidars will perform synchronized dual-Doppler range height indicator (RHI) scans towards specific locations of interest. Profiles of the horizontal velocity will then be computed from the radial velocity measurements at the intersection of the two RHI scans, which we refer to as a “virtual tower.”

During the ADDLidar campaign, two Halo XR+ Doppler lidars on loan from the ARM user facility will be configured to cycle continuously through a series of virtual towers at locations in front of and behind the leading row of turbines in the King Plains Wind Farm. The data obtained from the virtual towers will be used to investigate upstream blockage effects, turbine wakes, and potentially wake interactions. The ADDLidar deployment also provides an opportunity to gather wind, turbulence, and aerosol backscatter data at new locations within the SGP domain. As such, the data gathered during this deployment will be useful for understanding land-atmosphere interactions, spatial heterogeneity, and the impact of wind farms on ARM measurements at SGP.

Timeline