Impacts of wind farms on weather radar data and spatial rainfall estimation

摘要

Lately, the use of wind farms in Romania to generate electricity is growing.Wind turbines cause contamination of weather radar signals that is under certainconditions difficult to distinguish from weather echoes. Areas of false reflectivities,mean radial velocity and spectrum width data may appear in base data displays. Theseartifacts can affect and confuse weather forecasters and other radar data users. Sincedata from weather radars are key components in the decision making process of issuingsevere weather warnings and nowcasting forecasts, and numerical weather modelsassimilation, this paper documents and addresses some of the impacts of wind farms on radardata. The WSR"8D radar at Medgidia was chosen for this study. A combination oflow-resolution radar products and high-resolution data was used to document the impacts.The data have been used to construct a climatology of wind farm echo observation andto develop a GIS-based mitigation algorithm. The results of the study highlight thepotential impacts of the wind farm echoes and the performance of the correctionalgorithm. The operational implementation of the mitigation algorithm was proposed.