First commercial offshore measurement with IWES LiDAR buoy
The buoy with equipment for laser-supported remote sensing (LiDAR) passed its first real test in the shape of the winter storm “Freja” with flying colours just one week after its installation: Significant wave heights of up to 4.5 m were measured in the Danish North Sea off the coast of Thyborøn, but this did not interrupt the measuring campaign. The buoy will be in use until February 2016 for measuring wind speeds at heights of up to 250 m as part of the RUNE re- search project (Reducing the Uncertainty of Near-shore wind resource Estimates using onshore lidars) conducted by the Technical University of Denmark (DTU).
With deployment of the buoy and evaluation of the measuring campaign, Fraunhofer IWES, as the subcontractor, is contributing to the further improve- ment of yield forecasting for near-shore offshore wind farms by providing ref- erence measurements.
“The LiDAR buoy is a key measurement reference for the experimental cam- paign of the RUNE project, in which we are measuring the near-shore wind from the coast with onshore scanning lidars in order to estimate the errors of mesoscale models” explained Alfredo Peña from DTU Wind Energy
