Lidar observations of marine boundary-layer winds and heights: a preliminary study

Here we describe a nearly 1-yr meteorological campaign, which was carried out at the FINO3 marine research platform on the German North Sea, where a pulsed wind lidar and a ceilometer were installed besides the platform's 105-m tower and measured winds and the aerosol backscatter in the entire marine atmospheric boundary layer. The campaign was the last phase of a research project, in which the vertical wind profile in the atmospheric boundary layer was firstly investigated on a coastal and a semi-urban site. At FINO3 the wind lidar, which measures the wind speed up to 2000 m, shows the highest data availability (among the three sites) and a very good agreement with the observations of wind speed and direction from cup anemometers and vanes from the platform's tower. The wind lidar was also able to perform measurements under a winter storm where 10-s gusts were observed above 60 m s−1 within the range 400–600 m. The ceilometer and wind lidar have also the potential of detecting the marine boundary layer height based on, respectively, direct and indirect observations of the aerosol backscatter. About 10 % of the measured wind profiles are available within the first 1000 m, which allows the investigation of the behavior with height of the two horizontal wind speed components. From the preliminary analysis of these vertical profiles, a variety of atmospheric and forcing conditions is distinguished; from a number of 10-min mean profiles the wind is observed to turn both anti- and clockwise more than 50 °, likely indicating the influence of baroclinity