An LES-based airborne Doppler lidar simulator and its application to wind profiling in inhomogeneous flow conditions

Gasch, Philipp; Wieser, Andreas; Lundquist, Julie K.; Kalthoff, Norbert

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-13-1609-2020

Articles | Volume 13, issue 3

https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-13-1609-2020

© Author(s) 2020. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/amt-13-1609-2020

© Author(s) 2020. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 13, issue 3

Research article

|

02 Apr 2020

Research article |

| 02 Apr 2020

An LES-based airborne Doppler lidar simulator and its application to wind profiling in inhomogeneous flow conditions

Philipp Gasch, Andreas Wieser, Julie K. Lundquist, and Norbert Kalthoff

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Final revised paper (published on 02 Apr 2020)
Preprint (discussion started on 05 Jun 2019)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

AC: Author comment | RC: Referee comment | SC: Short comment | EC: Editor comment

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- Supplement

RC1: 'Review of LES Doppler lidar paper', Anonymous Referee #2, 13 Jul 2019
- AC1: 'Short reply to RC1: 'Review of LES Doppler lidar paper'', Philipp Gasch, 17 Jul 2019
RC2: 'An LES-based airborne Doppler lidar simulator for investigation of wind profiling in inhomogeneous flow conditions by Gasch et al., 2019', Anonymous Referee #3, 22 Aug 2019
- AC2: 'Short reply to referee #3', Philipp Gasch, 26 Aug 2019
RC3: 'Review of "An LES-based airborne Doppler lidar simulator for investigation of wind profiling in inhomogeneous flow conditions"', Alan Brewer, 22 Oct 2019
- AC3: 'Short reply to Alan Brewer', Philipp Gasch, 26 Nov 2019

Peer-review completion

AR: Author's response | RR: Referee report | ED: Editor decision

AR by Philipp Gasch on behalf of the Authors (15 Jan 2020) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (17 Jan 2020) by Gerd Baumgarten

RR by Anonymous Referee #3 (05 Feb 2020)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

The condensed version of the article reads well, and the significant effort put in by the authors is noticeable. The motivation is very clear now and makes helps the reader with the objective of the paper. Overall the paper looks publishable, except for a few minor clarifications mentioned below.

Page 6 Line 9: Replace “starting at a distance” with “a blind zone”

Page 13/14 Line 6/20: I guess there is still not a clear conclusion on why winds deviation is above 1 m/s after strict data filtering for higher wind speeds? Is it not purely due to heterogeneities from your data and filtering? Are there further data filtering thresholds that remove those data points or maybe using better regression statistics on radial velocity rejection like using COOKS distance or DFITTS parameters (as in Bocciopio 1995)? Maybe an uncertainty analysis is important here.

Page 14 line 25 – Steep is very subjective; can an elevation/zenith angle be provided here for reference instead? And the same for Page 15 line 1 (Shallow).

Page 15 Line 6: Is it because the reduced number of samples? At what higher R2 threshold do you notice higher bias?

Page 15 Line 19: This feels not a very practical solution. Are you are assuming that the winds are constant with height here? In case of significant shear, if the winds are < 5 m/s at the bottom 200 m, and > 5 m/s above 200 m, this type of analysis will not hold. Is my understanding correct? Maybe you can rephrase this section to better convey your thoughts.

Page 15 Line 35: I am not sure I follow, what is an “in-situ uncertainty forecast”? Can you provide some references or some quick explanation?

Page 16 Line 27: Remove “or even because of”

Figure b7: The RMSE for 0m/s background wind case goes above 1 m/s? The marker disappears after ~ 100m. Similarly, the relative error.

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RR by Anonymous Referee #2 (11 Feb 2020)

ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (review by editor) (13 Feb 2020) by Gerd Baumgarten

AR by Philipp Gasch on behalf of the Authors (19 Feb 2020) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish as is (19 Feb 2020) by Gerd Baumgarten

AR by Philipp Gasch on behalf of the Authors (20 Feb 2020) Manuscript

Short summary

We present an airborne Doppler lidar simulator (ADLS) based on high-resolution atmospheric wind fields (LES). The ADLS is used to evaluate the retrieval accuracy of airborne wind profiling under turbulent, inhomogeneous wind field conditions inside the boundary layer. With the ADLS, the error due to the violation of the wind field homogeneity assumption used for retrieval can be revealed. For the conditions considered, flow inhomogeneities exert a dominant influence on wind profiling error.