SEMINAR SERIES and COLLOQUIA

Wind turbines are recently discovered interference to weather radar due to the extremely large size and complex motions. The bias in moment estimate caused by the wind turbine interference can severely affect base data quality within and around the wind farm area. The most effective way to avoid this interference is to locate wind farms outside the Radar Line of Sight (RLOS). However, as the wind energy industry develops quickly, more wind farms are going to be built to meet the growing needs of electricity; as a result, it is not always feasible to site the wind farm outside the RLOS given the dense distribution of major radar networks in the US, especially in areas with abundant wind resources. Therefore, it is necessary to study this newly emerged type of radar interference in order to quantify the impact to nearby radars, and seeking mitigation solutions.

The initial analysis of the WSR-88D wind turbine IQ time series indicates that the radar return from wind turbine is extremely complicated and can contaminate the entire Doppler spectrum. The conventional ground clutter filter such as GMAP (Gaussian Model Adaptive Processing) thus has failed to remove this type of clutter. Both EM modeling and measurement approaches have been taken in efforts to characterize the wind turbine radar return. In this talk, different measurement approaches will be discussed and compared with each other, which includes measurements from WSR-88D, scaled measurements using VNA (Vector Network Analyzer) and lab radar, also the field studies by the mobile radar RaXPol. Different measurements are used to explore different aspects of wind turbine radar signatures.

Atmospheric Radar Research Seminar Series website

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