Wind resource assessment using airborne LiDAR data and smoothed particle hydrodynamics

The increasing availability of airborne Light Detection And Ranging (LiDAR) data provides new opportunities for environmental simulations. This paper proposes a new method for wind resource assessment by using wind simulation over 3D geometry extracted from classified LiDAR data. The simulation of wind flow is performed by using Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) in two phases for each time-step, firstly over low-resolution Digital Elevation Model (DEM) data, and secondly over high-resolution LiDAR data. Inlet wind particles depend on the logarithmic wind profile, where the morphometric aerodynamic roughness length is considered. The estimated wind power is integrated over a given timespan, resulting in wind energy potential. The simulated velocities were validated with annual measurements, where an agreement of 80.72% and 90.81% was achieved for ~0.5km2 sized urban and rural areas, respectively. The cumulative wind energy potential at 20 m above surface height is at 7.62 GWh and 56.613 GWh for the given areas, respectively.