Research on impact of range resolutions on wind detection performance using virtual lidar

The impact of range resolution on the accuracy of wind lidar cannot be ignored, which is quantitatively evaluated using virtual lidar. This study conducts a comparative analysis of three virtual lidar generation methods: the direct averaging method, the energy weighting method, and the time-domain analysis method. The error assessment between the wind retrieved by virtual lidar and the reference wind is carried out. Results show that insufficient range resolution can cause underestimation and misalignment of wind speed extremes. Moreover, there are differences in the retrieval results generated by the three virtual lidar methods. Based on these findings, a dimensionless parameter is proposed to decouple the relationship between range resolution and wind field scale. The fitting relationships between this parameter and error metrics are established, enabling the selection of the optimal virtual lidar generation method for different scenarios. Finally, wind speed errors and image similarity metrics are combined to comprehensively evaluate the impact of range resolutions on detection of typical building wake flow. This research provides a vital foundation for evaluating the wind field detection performance of coherent Doppler wind lidar, which remains applicable to direct detection wind lidar.