Off-shore wind turbine clutter characteristics and identification in operational C-band weather radar measurements

Will Hall, Miguel Angel Rico-Ramirez, Stefan Kramer

Research output: Contribution to journalArticle (Academic Journal)peer-review

8 Citations (Scopus)
469 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

The aim of this work is to update ground clutter classification methods in weather radar rainfall measurements to more accurately identify clutter pixels from wind farms. Measurements from two dual polarised weather radars, based in the UK, will be used to determine the characteristics of multiple wind farms in the North Sea and the Irish Sea. Currently 21 of the top 25 largest offshore wind farms are located in these regions. The extensive area occupied by the wind farms creates problems for weather radars located in the neighbouring European countries. Data sets of wind farm, precipitation and ground clutter pixels were aggregated from Thurnham Radar measurements to form novel membership functions that can be used in a fuzzy logic classification system to identify wind farm clutter. When only ground clutter data sets were used for classification areas of the radar scans taken up by wind farm clutter were misclassified as rainfall. The inclusion of wind farm measurements lead to an increase in the ability of the algorithm to detect these pixels as clutter as the Heidke Skill Score increased from 67.4% to 97.8%. However there was a slight increase in the number of precipitation pixels incorrectly classified as clutter, with the false alarm rate increasing from 0.05% to 1.24% when all variables are used. The algorithm performed slightly better when applied to another radar in Hameldon Hill showing promise for application to the UK network without recalibration of membership functions.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)720–730
Number of pages11
JournalQuarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society
Volume143
Issue number703
Early online date27 Dec 2016
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Jan 2017

Research Groups and Themes

  • Water and Environmental Engineering

Keywords

  • Polarimetric Radar
  • Weather Radar
  • Wind Farm
  • Wind Turbine
  • Clutter
  • C-band

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  • NERC Studentship

    Rico-Ramirez, M. A. (Principal Investigator)

    1/08/141/08/17

    Project: Research

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