Rausch, Thomas; Cañadillas, Beatriz; Lampert, Astrid (2023): Coastal vertical wind lidar measurements of horizontal wind speed and wind direction from 40 to 500 m at Norderney island, German Bight, North Sea, Germany [dataset]. PANGAEA, https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.953770

A profiling ground-based Wind-LiDAR system, Windcube WLS8, developed by Leosphere (now Vaisala), was installed at the German Weather Service (DWD) (N 53° 42.75', E 007° 09.13', at Norderney Island) on 8 September 2019 to acquire coastal wind profiles as part of the research project X-Wakes.

The island of Norderney (dimension of 14 km x 2.5 km) is one of the East Frisian Islands and lies only a few kilometres from the German North Sea coast. The DWD site is located at an altitude of 7 m above sea level. No obstacles interfere with the lidar measurement. The Wind-LiDAR provided the vertical profiles of the wind speed components, measured by means of the Doppler Beam Swinging technique. Four lines of sight are sequentially scanned by a 1.54 µm pulsed fiber laser to perform the geometrical computation of the 3D wind vector components. From the raw data, the average horizontal wind speed and wind direction is calculated routinely for intervals of 10 min. The wind speed and direction, retrieved from the lidar system, are available at 25 height levels between 40 m and 500 m, with a vertical resolution of 10 m up to 100 m, 20 m up to 400 m, and 50 m up to 500 m. Data gaps are mainly caused by low clouds and fog, which cannot be penetrated by the laser pulses.

Note that an offset of 7 m and an azimuth offset of -115° (N faces 245°) must be added to the heights and wind direction given in the 10-min files.

Acknowledgements: The LiDAR observations have been funded by the project X-Wakes German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy, grant number 03EE3008B. The authors would like to thank Richard Fruehmann, Hauke Decker and Christian Krüger from UL International GmbH for installing, maintaining and monitoring the system. The DWD, in particular Klaus Wein and Ruth Molzahn, are thanked for supporting and allowing the system to be installed on the DWD weather station site on Norderney.