P10.1
Automatic Detection of Wind Turbine Clutter Using Doppler Spectral Features
Kenta T. Hood, University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK; and S. M. Torres and R. D. Palmer
Wind turbines built to
generate electricity cause clutter contamination that is often difficult to
distinguish from weather signals.
As the country relies on wind power for a larger portion of its energy
production, more wind farms are being built to meet this demand. More wind turbines within the range of
weather radar increase unwanted clutter returns affecting other algorithms,
which rely on uncontaminated weather data. Because the turbines are always at the same location, it
would seem easy to identify where wind turbine clutter (WTC) contaminates the
weather data. However, under
certain atmospheric conditions, anomalous propagation of the radar beam can
occur such that WTC corrupts weather data without the radar operator knowing of
this contamination. As a first
step in any mitigation scheme, an effective detection algorithm is needed to
perform automatic flagging of contaminated data. The flagged data can then be censored or filtered out, thus
reducing harmful effects that propagate to other algorithms, such as
quantitative precipitation estimates.
In this paper, both actual and simulated WTC data are used to study the
characteristics of WTC to design a WTC detection algorithm. It will be shown that unique spectral
features of the Doppler spectrum related to WTC signatures can be used to classify
the radar return as contaminated by WTC or not. These features can then be used in a fuzzy logic algorithm
to improve the robustness of the detection algorithm.
Poster Session 10, Advanced Radar Technologies II
Thursday, 8 October 2009, 1:30 PM-3:30 PM, President's Ballroom
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