Combined wind lidar and cloud radar for high-resolution wind profiling

Abstract

This paper introduces an experimental setup for retrieving horizontal wind speed and direction profiles with a high temporal and vertical resolution for process studies and validation of convection-permitting model simulations. The CMTRACE (tracing convective momentum transport in complex cloudy atmospheres) campaign used collocated wind lidar and cloud radar measurements to retrieve seamless wind profiles from near the surface up to cloud tops. It took place in Cabauw, the Netherlands, between 13 September and 3 October 2021. The intermediate processing steps for generating the level 1 and level 2 data, such as second trip echoes filtering, offset correction, wind retrieval, re-gridding, and flagging, are described. In level 1 (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6926483, Dias Neto, 2022a), the data from lidar and radars are kept in the original spatial and temporal resolution, while in level 2 (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6926605, Dias Neto, 2022b), they are regridded to a common spatial and temporal resolution. Statistical analyses of the lidar's and radar's wind speed and direction profiles indicate a correlation higher than 0.95 for both variables. The bias of wind direction and speed calculated between radar's and lidar's observations are 0.24∘ and −0.16 m s−1, respectively. The foreseen initial application of the datasets includes the study of convective momentum transport and its validation in regional weather forecasts and large-eddy simulation hindcasts.