Robust Lidar Data Processing and Quality Control Methods Developed for the SWiFT Wake Steering Experiment

Sandia National Laboratories and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory conducted a wake-steering field experiment at the Scaled Wind Farm Technology facility. The campaign included the use of two highly instrumented V27 wind turbines, an upstream meteorological tower, and high-resolution wake measurements of the upstream wind turbine using a customized scanning SpinnerLidar from the Technical University of Denmark. The present work details how the SpinnerLidar data uploaded to the Department of Energy Atmosphere to Electrons Data Archive and Portal was processed, quality controlled and assured to guarantee high data availability with the removal of invalid measurements. A multidimensional approach to processing the SpinnerLidar Doppler spectra was developed based on matching erroneous measurements within the two-dimensional lidar scan with patterns inside the multidimensional lidar Doppler spectra. This method allows image processing techniques to be used to remove regions of the Doppler spectra that are contaminated by hard targets and isolate the velocity field of interest, allowing more accurate line-of-sight velocity measurements and enabling the estimation of the turbulence of the line-of-sight velocities within the probe volume.