Congreso: Fifth European Conference on Radar in Meteorology and Hydrology. ERAD 2008. Lugar: Helsinki, Finlandia Fecha: Junio-Julio 2008

Autores: Beatriz Gallardo, Félix Pérez y Fernando Aguado

The use of wind farms to generate electricity is growing increasingly due to the importance of being a renewable
energy source. These installations can have over a hundred turbines of up to 120 m height each. Moreover, windmills
are expected to be significantly higher in a few years, with blade tip heights reaching 200 m. This continued growing
both in the number and the height of the wind farms is seriously threatening the correct performance of weather
radars. In this work we will analyze the Doppler spectral content of the wind turbine clutter (WTC) signal and characterize it by means of spectral and adaptive signal processing. The experiments, made with the aid of the Spanish weather radar
network, had two main goals: to gather data in normal operation mode and in spotlight mode. First, this will show
the variations of the wind turbine clutter Doppler spectrum as functions of range and azimuth angle. This spectrum is
expected to be wider than the weather spectrum and have other specific features. In the second case, spotlight
operation mode, the data are collected from a particular cell, known to experiment wind turbine clutter and so defined by
specific range and azimuth angle. Thus, the information about the temporal evolution of the Doppler spectrum can be
easily extracted. These experiments allow us to do a detailed examination of the spectral characteristics and statistics of
the wind turbine clutter signal and so to develop specific mitigation schemes.