Detection and mitigation of wind turbine clutter in C-band meteorological radar

Abstract

Wind farm installations that are near radar systems cause clutter returns that can affect the normal operation of the radar. Wind turbines provoke clutter reflectivity returns with unpredictable Doppler spreads that are not easily minimised. In this study, the authors focus on the mitigation of wind turbine clutter (WTC) for C-band weather radar. The proposed detection technique is applicable when using the spotlight operation mode during radar data gathering. This means that the dwell time must be long enough to observe certain statistics that allow for the detection of wind turbines. This specific operation mode can be used between normal radar scans. The detection technique can be applied before or after real rain data are added to WTC, with different results. Our mitigation technique uses the information from bins adjacent to WTC detections. The authors test this algorithm with real data from wind farms in rainy weather. The results are encouraging, because the absolute errors, both in reflectivity and in velocity measurements, are significantly reduced.