Atmospheric Boundary Layer Wind Profile Estimation Using Neural Networks Applied to Lidar Measurements

Abstract

This paper introduces a new methodology for estimating the wind profile within the ABL (Atmospheric Boundary Layer) using a neural network and a single-point near-ground measurement. An important advantage of this solution when compared with others available in the literature is that it only requires near surface measurements for the prognosis once the neural network is trained. Another advantage is that it can be used to study the wind profile temporal evolution. This work uses data collected by a lidar sensor located at the Universidad de León (Spain). The neural network best configuration was determined using sensibility analyses. The result is a multilayer perceptron with three layers for each altitude: the input layer has six nodes for the last three measurements, the second has 128 nodes and the third consists of two nodes that provide u and v. The proposed method has better performance than traditional methods. The obtained wind profile information obtained is useful for multiple applications, such as preliminary calculations of the wind resource or CFD models.