The presentation consists of two parts: in the first part, the Ferry Lidar Experiment - which is one of the NEWA Experiments, ie a set of unique flow experiments conducted as part of the New European Wind Atlas (NEWA) Project - is introduced. For the Ferry Lidar Experiment a Doppler lidar instrument was placed on a ferry connecting Kiel and Klaipeda in the Southern Baltic Sea from February to June 2017. A comprehensive set of all relevant motions was recorded together with the lidar data and processed in order to obtain and provide corrected wind time series. In the second part of the presentation, first results of a benchmark study are presented which was conducted on the basis of the NEWA Ferry Lidar dataset. In this study a number of different mesoscale model simulations, provided by different participants of the study, are compared with the measurement data. ;