Since a few years, a new wind measurement instrument has been competing with standard cupanemometers: the LiDAR. The performances of this instrument over complex terrain are stilla matter of debate and this is mainly due to the flow homogeneity assumption made by theinstrument. In this work, the error caused by this hypothesis was evaluated with the helpof OpenFOAM 1.7, MeteoDyn WT 4.0 and WAsP Engineering for a LiDAR deployed on a complexsite covered with dense forest. The assessment of the CFD model firstly revealed thesignificant 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 remotesensor, an averaged error of less than 3% was observed, suggesting that the LiDAR is onlyaffected by topographic variations in the immediate vicinity of the scanned volume.
