Identification and Characterization of Wind Turbine Clutter (WTC) Contamination on the WSR-88D

With the increasing desire for renewable energy, new wind farm development is on the rise. The United States Geological Survey (USGS) database of wind farm placement shows an increasing number of wind farms within the (normal and anomalous) propagating view of existing WSR-88D radars. Wind farms within the radars propagating view create unwanted reflections and obscurations that may hinder the extraction of meteorological estimates from composite received signals. Consequently, the impacts caused by wind turbine clutter (WTC) contamination on weather-radar product interpretation becomes more difficult while automated algorithms become less dependable. The need for research into mitigating WTC contamination impacts through signal processing solutions is essential in providing reliable weather operations. In this paper, we present preliminary research results to identify WTC contamination with temporal and spectral features from recorded digital signals collected on operational WSR-88D S-band radar systems. Then, using the identified WTC signals, we attempt to characterize the effects that WTC contamination has on the weather estimates using simulations and real data.