Wind turbines interfere with Doppler Radar
May 29th, 2009 at 12:07 pm by Bill Steffen under Bill's Blog, Weather
Early this year, 36 wind turbines began operating on Butler Ridge northwest of Milwaukee. The turbines sit at 1170 feet above sea level and the turbine towers are 260 feet above the ground. The turbine blades are roughly 300 feet in diameter, so the top of the wind turbine rotors are about 400 feet above the ground on Butler Ridge. That’s high enough to cause a significant reflection on local radars. Many Doppler radars can remove interference (called clutter). However the radars were designed to filter out returned (reflected) energy that has little or no motion. This is effective for removing the returned signals from hills, tall buildings, and towers. Unfortunately, the radar sees the rotating wind turbine blades as targets having reflectivity and motion, hence processes these returns as storms. It’s possible that in a severe weather situation, storms could be “masked” over the area. The National Weather Service is conducting an outreach program to ensure that the wind energy industry and developers are aware of Doppler Radar locations and the potential impacts on radar data and on the ability of forecasters to give accurate severe weather warnings. (picture is from the National Weather Service radar at Sullivan, Wisconsin).
This is not good news.
Check it out, found it on WU’s radar too: http://www.wunderground.com/radar/radblast.asp?zoommode=pan&prevzoom=zoom&num=6&frame=0&delay=15&scale=0.209&noclutter=0&ID=MKX&type=NCR&showstorms=0&lat=0&lon=0&label=you&map.x=400&map.y=240&scale=0.209¢erx=376¢ery=378&showlabels=1&rainsnow=0&lightning=0&lerror=20&num_stns_min=2&num_stns_max=9999&avg_off=9999&smooth=0
By the way I am experiencing quite a bit of lag with your blog, and your blog only. I have Charter Cable internet.. everything else loads right away.
Even though you have Charter Cable, there could be a number of other reasons for slow response. These are the things to look for:
1)If you have only 500 meg of RAM (random access memory), you may have too many windows open. To have more then 3-windows open, you should have at least 768 meg, preferably 1 gig.
2) When was the last time you defragged the C:\ drive?
3) How much space do you have allocated for temp files on C:\ drive
4) How old is your computer? Computers five years or older generally have difficulty running any of the modern day browsers. If you are using FireFox and you have a lot of gizmos running in the background, Blogs will be notoriously slow.
5) Charter Cable comes in a number configurations and are priced accordingly. You could have one of the slower versions, thus with low memory (RAM), severely fragmented C:\, the computer is forced to use the hard drive for extra RAM, thus the problem only manifests itself.
6) What is the speed of your hard drive? A 5200 rpm drive generally will be 50% slower then a 7200 rpm drive. And slows down faster with fragmentation of the drive.
7) When was the last time you cleaned out your Internet cache?
All of the above will weigh heavily on most all Internet sites which have many entries. If you defrag at least once a week, increase your RAM, and get a faster C-drive, you’ll see a marked improvement.
Did you not read the man’s post? He is having issues with the load time on this blog ONLY, and you’re giving him the full computer tuneup regimen. Sounds like a potential problem with the server, not the client.
Not to mention the fact that you’re assuming that he’s running Windows. There are open-source operating systems that will run very well on 256 mb of ram, using 5+ year-old hardware.
Otherwise, the suggestions are sound (assuming he’s running Windows and experiencing a general slowness).
I was gonna email you that story Bill. Glad to see you found it.
I wonder how hard it would be to program most of that out (or maybe they can just coat the blades with stealth-fighter paint!) Anyway, the extra clutter south of the windmills on the above WU link from Charles also shows up on the current NWS Milwaukee site, so there are obviously other return issues at times.
The “extra” clutter is just standard ground clutter, which doesn’t have a real big impact. And some of that is improved with version 11 which literally was shipped to NWS GRR today and should be online in the next month or so.
Windmills are an issue but fortunately the ones around the Great Lakes aren’t nearly as large as what they have in the plains states…
Yeah, I drove by a group of 200 windmills northwest of Amarillo TX last year. Glad that the radar is still being upgraded, though.
Wow – that is a huge bummer! It would be a very smart smart person that could figure out a remedy for this one… Can you regulate how high they can be and still be just as effective? Could you pinpoint the GPS location of the object to make it “disappear”?
Tooooooooo Funnnyyyyyy!
YIKES!!!!!
that could be very dangerous during severe storm season
if we even get one this year, before you know it, it will be snowing again!
Yeah, hopefully they can do something about that…That can get someone seriously injured!
Relax…at WOODSTORMTEAM8 they have the power to protect. I do get a grin out of this. Let’s stop this silly green thing and ramp up some nukeplants and problem solved. Ok…. here we go with the waste fuel. Probably not in my lifetime but some time in the future we will figure a second use for it. Guess who’s goldmine that will be?
Seems like an easy fix would be to enhance the radar software to specifically remove this clutter. The turbines and blades will obviously remain in the exact same spot therefore they could be edited out. Severe weather would likely leave a slightly different reflection allowing it to show in the edited area of the radar image.
That’s just too funny!
LisaM…. How funny IS too funny!?!? You are too funny!
Wind turbines depend upon steady high winds to generate energy. So when storms cause gusty, higher-than-normal winds, the blades are shut down.
Thus during a severe storm, wouldn’t all the wind generator blades be stationary? It doesn’t seem like the two are that incompatible.
Under normal weather conditions, I could see where Doppler could misinterpret the moving blades as a storm, but that would be continuous and faily easily identified by location, and thus ignored.
Wonder why no one thought of this in the first place before putting up the turbines. Looks like someone is going to have to think a little more carefully about where those turbines should go before being in a haste.
They did think about it… They have to go up somewhere, and the entire country is covered by weather radar, so there isn’t a whole lot of choice.
Turbines……….a Big Mistake.first of all the wind isn’t consistent enough to actually fuel energy on any kind of effective basis and more concerning is a fact I recently learned….birds will not migrate or nest near turbines……..cell towers caused the bee problem.now turbines cause the bird problem.where are we once we lose the birds and bees???