Investigation of turbulence measurements with a continuous wave, conically scanning LiDAR

LIDAR systems are getting more and more accurate and reliable. It has been shown many times that the mean horizontal wind speed measured by a lidar over flat terrain compares very well with that measured by a cup anemometer. But can a lidar measure turbulence? Here we investigate the case of a continuous wave, conically scanning Zephir lidar. First, the wind speed standard deviation measured by such a lidar gives on average 80% of the standard deviation measured by a cup anemometer. This difference is due to the spatial averaging inherently made by a cw conically scanning lidar. The spatial averaging is done in two steps: 1) the weighted averaging of the wind speed in the probe volume of the laser beam; 2) the averaging of the wind speeds occurring on the circular path described by the conically scanning lidar. Therefore the standard deviation measured by a lidar resolves only the turbulence structures larger than a length scale depending on the circle diameter and the mean wind speed (range of magnitude: 100m). However, the Zephir lidar gives another turbulence quantity, the so-called turbulence parameter, which can resolve turbulence structures with a smaller length scale. In this paper, we suggest a volumetric filtering of the turbulence to represent the effect of the spatial averaging operated by a lidar when measuring the wind speed. We then evaluate this model by comparing the theoretical results to experimental data obtained with several Zephir systems, for both turbulence quantities.