An Onshore Deployment of Advanced Dual-Doppler Radar for Wind Energy Applications

Abstract

Two advanced X-band radars have been developed and deployed by Texas Tech University to provide continuous wind measurements serving project AWAKEN, including the construction of near real-time dual-Doppler synthesized wind fields covering a large 35 km x 35 km analysis domain. This deployment represents the first overland long duration utilization of the technology, which was configured to document a wide range of wind energy relevant flows spanning turbine inflow/wake flow to regional wind flows and wind plant interactions. The overland environment coupled with technology innovation has led to very high data availability yielding a growing archive of measurements documenting diverse atmospheric phenomena including numerous instances of wind plant interaction. Through the first few project months, data availability greater than 90%, 80% and 70% has been assessed at the ranges of 8 km, 16 km, and 25 km, respectively. Robust data availability coupled with fast radar scan speeds and high along beam measurement resolution position advanced Doppler radar technology to broadly contribute to diverse wind energy measurement applications covering domains sizes that far exceed existing industry standard measurement systems.