Since a few years, a new wind measurement instrument has been competing with standard cup
anemometers: the LiDAR. The performances of this instrument over complex terrain are still
a matter of debate and this is mainly due to the flow homogeneity assumption made by the
instrument. In this work, the error caused by this hypothesis was evaluated with the help
of OpenFOAM 1.7, MeteoDyn WT 4.0 and WAsP Engineering for a LiDAR deployed on a complex
site covered with dense forest. The assessment of the CFD model firstly revealed the
significant impact of both the location and nature of the inlet boundary condition.
Despite the presence of terrain complexity within a radius of 340 m around the remote
sensor, an averaged error of less than 3% was observed, suggesting that the LiDAR is only
affected by topographic variations in the immediate vicinity of the scanned volume.