A study released by Vaisala has evaluated over 50,000 hours of wind data gathered from customer sites on 4 continents to conclude that the Vaisala Triton Wind Profiler is as accurate for wind resource assessment applications as a traditional met tower. The validation study, conducted by the Vaisala 3TIER Services wind resource assessment team, is the largest of its kind ever to have been undertaken.
The project compares data measured by the Triton to data collected from collocated met towers. Rather than focusing on a single met tower and a single remote sensor, the study analyses them both in real commercial deployments all over the world, across a wide range of weather regimes and geographic locations, over an extended period. Wind industry remote sensing technologies, such as LiDAR or SoDAR, employ light waves or sound waves to measure wind conditions at the heights where most wind turbines now operate. During the last decade, remote sensing systems have developed to complement and even become a viable alternative to met towers.