Wind Turbine Clutter mitigation for weather radar by Adaptive Spectrum Processing

Wind Turbine Clutter (WTC) is the radar clutter caused by strong backscatter from large wind turbines within the radar vicinity. Due to the rotation of the rotor blades, the Doppler spectrum of WTC varies from scan to scan. This time-varying radar signature results in the failure of classic ground clutter filter techniques. The Adaptive Spectrum Processing (ASP) algorithm proposed in this paper explores the spatial and spectral characteristics of weather returns in weather radar, and adaptively generates band pass filters based on the moment estimates of uncontaminated weather in detected wind farm region. The actual NEXRAD weather radar data have been used to verify this algorithm. The experiment shows significant improvement on moment estimation in terms of both bias and variance.