Applying erroneous boundary conditions (surface roughness) for wind flow modelling can have a large impact on the estimated performance of wind turbines, particularly in forested areas. Traditionally the estimation of the surface roughness is based on a subjective process that requires assigning a value to each land use class in the vicinity of the wind farm. Here we propose a new method which converts lidar scans from a plane into maps that can be used for wind flow modelling.