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Title: Spectral correction of turbulent energy damping on wind LiDAR measurements due to range-gate averaging
Continuous advancements in LiDAR technology have enabled compelling wind turbulence measurements within the atmospheric boundary layer with range gates shorter than 20 m and sampling frequency of the order of 10 Hz. However, estimates of the radial velocity from the back-scattered laser beam are inevitably affected by an averaging process within each range gate, generally modeled as a convolution between the actual velocity projected along the LiDAR line-of-sight and a weighting function representing the energy distribution of the laser pulse along the range gate. As a result, the spectral energy of the turbulent velocity fluctuations is damped within the inertial sub-range with respective reduction of the velocity variance, and, thus, not allowing to take advantage of the achieved spatio-temporal resolution of the LiDAR technology. In this article, we propose to correct this turbulent energy damping on the LiDAR measurements by reversing the effect of a low-pass filter, which can be estimated directly from the LiDAR measurements. LiDAR data acquired from three different field campaigns are analyzed to describe the proposed technique, investigate the variability of the filter parameters and, for one dataset, assess the procedure for spectral LiDAR correction against sonic anemometer data. It is found that the order of the low-pass filter used for modeling the energy damping on the LiDAR velocity measurements has negligible effects on the correction of the second-order statistics of the wind velocity. In contrast, its cutoff frequency plays a significant role in the spectral correction encompassing the smoothing effects connected with the LiDAR gate length.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1705837
NSF-PAR ID:
10292423
Author(s) / Creator(s):
;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Atmospheric measurement techniques
Volume:
14
Issue:
2
ISSN:
1867-1381
Page Range / eLocation ID:
1457-1474
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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