Abstract
Abstract. The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has repeatedly expressed concern over the increasing number of impact cases of wind turbine farms on weather radars. Current signal processing techniques to mitigate wind turbine clutter (WTC) are scarce, so the most practical approach to this issue is the assessment of the potential interference from a wind farm before it is installed. To do so, and in order to obtain a WTC reflectivity model, it is crucial to estimate the radar cross section (RCS) of the wind turbines to be built, which represents the power percentage of the radar signal that is backscattered to the radar receiver. For the proposed model, a representative scenario has been chosen in which both the weather radar and the wind farm are placed on clear areas; i.e., wind turbines are supposed to be illuminated only by the lowest elevation angles of the radar beam. This paper first characterizes the RCS of wind turbines in the weather radar frequency bands by means of computer simulations based on the physical optics theory and then proposes a simplified model to estimate wind turbine RCS values. This model is of great help in the evaluation of the potential impact of a certain wind farm on the weather radar operation.
Highlights
The potential impact of wind turbines on weather radar performance has been extensively studied in the last few years, with several evidences of wind turbine clutter observations in meteorological radar applications (Isom et al, 2008; Gallardo-Hernando et al, 2011; Norin and Haase, 2012; Vogt et al, 2011; World Meteorological Organization (WMO), 2005, 2010)
As demonstrated in the previous section, the mast is the main scatterer of the wind turbine due to its large dimensions, as it generates the maximum value of the radar cross section (RCS) pattern
In order to estimate the potential impact of a wind farm on a weather radar service, one of the main issues to be analyzed is wind turbine clutter reflectivity, which is directly related to the radar cross section of wind turbines
Summary
The potential impact of wind turbines on weather radar performance has been extensively studied in the last few years, with several evidences of wind turbine clutter observations in meteorological radar applications (Isom et al, 2008; Gallardo-Hernando et al, 2011; Norin and Haase, 2012; Vogt et al, 2011; WMO, 2005, 2010). The RCS is the projected area required to intercept and isotropically radiate the same power as the target scatters toward the receiver, and it is normally expressed in decibels with respect to a square meter (dBsm) (Skolnik, 2008; Rinehart, 1997) In this context, the goal of this paper is to propose simplified formulae for the estimation of reflectivity values from wind turbines at frequencies used by weather radars. Separate RCS patterns of the parts of the turbine are calculated in order to compare the relative contribution of each component Based on these simulations, a simple algorithm to evaluate the potential impact of a wind farm on a nearby weather radar is proposed. This work aims at making studies for the prediction of potential impacts between weather radar services and wind farm deployments easier to conduct
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