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Wind Farms Can Interfere With Doppler Radar
T Murphy writes "Wind farms can appear like storms or tornadoes on Doppler radar when placed too close to the radar. Tornado alley is a good area for wind farms, and good terrain for the turbines is also ideal for Doppler radar. With many new farms being constructed, the problem is growing. A false tornado warning was issued in Kansas by a computer, although canceled by a meteorologist aware of the problem — there are fears that false positives will grow. Worse would be a tornado ignored as a wind turbine. While meteorologists are trying to work with wind farm owners to shut off the turbines during bad weather, they have no control over the placement or operation of the turbines. Efforts are being made to improve detection technology to avoid further problems."
Of course the turbulence will look like tornadoes, but can't they adjust the sensitivity to "if vortex 3m ignore" Or set them to scan Higher then 100m Or whatever the tallest turbine is in that region?
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
Any weather researcher that knows what he is doing has moved off of Doppler years ago.
It's all dynamic phased radar arrays now. These have no trouble with wind farms.
cheap free energy vs pretty pictures of wind on weather.com
Gee.. I'm having a tough time deciding guys...
Sorry, I couldn't help it.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is usually crucified.
Simple solution - pan/tilt/zoom IP-based cameras placed within each wind farm where we can actually SEE if there's an oncoming tornado, etc. Very small investment considering the cost of the actual wind farm itself. Welcome to the new millenium.
"To err is human, to mod Funny divine."
If only the wind turbines were on stationary towers, then they might be able to map them, and use such a map to inform their interpretation of the radar data.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
My question is: how do you "shut down" a wind farm? The wind blows, the windmills turn.
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
I must really be missing something -- it seems to me that during bad weather, these wind farms could really be craking out the electricity! Why would the wind farms _want_ to shut down during those times?
Who cares. This isn't news, it's someones problem at work.
I am not a meteorologist, but don't tornadoes occur because there is a horizontal boundary between two different types of air masses, and the tornado acts as a funnel to equalize the pressure between the two or something? Maybe wind turbines, and the mixed and turbulence they cause actually prevent tornadoes. Who knows? And, don't many tornadoes occur over particularly flat land? The turbines might reshape the landscape enough to disturb the atmosphere enough to prevent them. Turbines looking like tornadoes on radar make me think i'm not totally crazy.
Wind farms look like tornados on radar --> wind farms and tornados are the same --> wind farms cause tornados
Time to start a panic. Snopes here I come
/
/
For extra credit:
Tornados are a weather event --> all major weather changes are caused by global warming --> wind farms cause global warming
Tornado warnings are extremely vague. Anyone who has spent significant time living in tornado alley can tell you they are routinely ignored. And the new technologies that attempt to pinpoint tornadoes exactly (TVS, VIPIR) aren't as accurate as they're made out to be. False positives are nothing new.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
IAMFWDWR (I am a meteorologist familiar with Doppler weather radar) and it doesn't worry me at all. There are lots of objects that cause the same types of problems, including rotating radar antennas and buildings.
When a weather radar system is set up the technicians will do a radar survey of the area and then flag areas for the computer (called an RPG, Radar Product Generator) to ignore. For a wind farm they'd look for an area in low scan levels with a high spectrum width and low to zero velocity and tell the RPG to ignore them. If these areas are too far away from the radar, they won't even be noticed by the radar (all scans are pointed slightly "upwards" so even with the lowest scan level something 200 feet tall would not be sensed unless it was within about 4.5 miles of the radar, give or take) unless you have a problem with subrefraction where the radar beam is bent downwards due to atmospheric effects. This would probably be the only time that the situation would cause a false positive and a meteorologist with any amount of common sense is going to investigate the area as it wouldn't be moving at all and would only appear in one or two scan levels.
The automatic warnings generated by a NEXRAD system are helpful, but are nowhere near foolproof. A competent meteorologist will be able to investigate the areas and determine if a weather warning or advisory is warranted within only a few minutes. (generally less than 30 seconds with a proper setup) Detection technology is already in place and easily enacted. Article is ignorance at best, and scaremongering at worst.
The United Kingdom military has had to stop the development of some wind farms because it would leave a blind spot to their early warning systems. Their government has doled out a fair bit of cash to find a solution to the issue.
In that case, you can obviously tell the radar to ignore readings with such-and-such parameters in the spot with the turbines. It's not like the turbines are going to be traveling SSE at 30 MPH.
It's very much like ground clutter caused by buildings with older radar systems.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Wind turbines should have a more or less predictable (and hence, recognizable) radar signature. IIRC the US military use turbine signatures (of aircraft engines) as part of non-cooperative target recognition (NCTR), i.e. the ability to recognize the aircraft type from a radar return, without having to rely on IFF transponders. But this probably requires better radars and processing than Nexrad can provide.
"Locked, .... and waiting for confirmation"
Ooops.
Sorry about that.
Yours In Peace,
K. Trout
Comment removed based on user account deletion
If the tornado is occurring where the wind farm is, it's the turbines.
If the tornado is occurring where the wind farm is, and the electricity goes out, it's not the turbines.
It'd be a damn shame with all this great technology and great problems to solve if they had to rely on a phone call to a guy at the wind farm who had to look out the window for them in order to know whether there was a tornado or not.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
The wind farms are interfering with radar systems used to detect storms which have increased in number and intensity due to global warming caused by burning fossil fuels which we are trying to reduce by building wind farms. It's like a never ending cycle of bullshit.
It's a very dark ride.
They should just go back to coal-fired nuclear power plants.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
When I read the title, farms full of farting cows came to mind initially...
This is from slashdot-nuclear-loby-department
http://radar.weather.gov/radar.php?rid=buf&product=N0R&overlay=11101111&loop=no Perfect example, if you look at the National Weather Service radar for Buffalo, southeast of the "o" in Buffalo you'll see an orange strip, there are about 100 windmills on hills about 25-30 miles from the airport weather station reflecting the Doppler back.
Put simple wind speed sensors (and other weather reporting gizmos) at each big wind tower, have them automatically update that info upstream so it can be cross referenced. If the remote radar says tornado in the direction of a tower, but the tower only reports a 40 mile an hour wind...you can nail the false positives easier. Turn a liability into thousands of new weather reporting assets.
All of those turbines make pretty decent wind speed/direction instruments, and they're all connected. How much would it cost to rig data feeds from them to the weather data collection system? I mean, if the weather computers are reading a Doppler shift from an area where there are wind farms but the wind turbines are all indicating 80 kph winds in the same direction it's not hard to figure out what's going on. Likewise if they're showing major surface-level wind shear around a vertical axis!
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Answer from Jon Steward: Ah, you mean those oil & gas companies with their own armies killing dozens of people and owning whole foreign countries? Or do you mean those who use the US army, kill tenthousands of people and *invade* foreign countries? Because I'm not quite sure, which one you mean...
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Ya, I was still thinking about that after I posted, that they simply must already have a turbine tach installed so they would know windspeed. And for sure they have power and must report various things to their control panel admins for monitoring. Seems not much of a stretch at all to have this info forwarded to the weather and radar folks. Probably useful data to have anyway, long term precise wind speeds and other sorts of weather information.
What about all the people from the Key Atomic Benefits Office Of Mankind? They have a powerful lobby too...
And no one has realized that wind farms are static?
1. Detect Tornado
2. If it is at the same place as any windfarm
2a Ignore detection
else
2b Register detection
3 Make money, live free and sing.
I prey for the death of people who come up with such dumb shit every day, but Satan has not yet answered me.
Who will give me justice ?
Jesus?
--------------------------------------------- "In the end, we're all just water and old stars."
When the day comes that wind farms are developed which resemble, from a bird's eye view, a doppler hook echo which happens to travel at about 30 mph, THEN I might worry about true/false positives being misinterpreted/ignored.
It hit double your "most optimistic" figure in 2008 and is growing fast, with *plenty* of places to stick in new towers. They haven't hardly started yet, let alone hit some "peak production" level. The US now surpasses Germany in total installed capacity and there are plans to keep increasing this for the foreseeable future. It has been the fastest growing segment in the electricity production market for some years now. A recent article: http://www.grandforksherald.com/event/article/id/131110/
Recent advances in giant batteries for wind power load balancing: http://www.reuters.com/article/GCA-GreenBusiness/idUSTRE57P4PJ20090826
So a Fox affiliate employee took the opportunity to...
1) Downplay some senseless and sensationalist bit of fear-mongering...
2) While saying something nice about a green technology that suffers from a lot of NIMBYism...
3) And he based it all on solid science and some common sense?
He was fired immediately after, right?
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Have these wind turbines registered with the National Weather Service and mark the locations in the system. Also, place transponders on the turbines to verify their operational status. If a tornado is detected near a known turbine location and the turbine fails to report its status, there probably is "something" in the area bad enough to damage a turbine.
8==8 Bones 8==8
Buildings cause the same problem; anyone familiar with coherence and/or constructive and destructive interference of electromagnetic waves (or any other type of other wave) would say "No sh*t, Sherlock!"
I work for NWS. False alarms are rare. The Mets know where the farms are and the signals are always there. While there is a chance of a mistake in the heat of battle - the duty Mets are usually overloaded with information during a convective event - they don't happen that often. A bigger issue is a farm degrades the performance of the radar around the farm. In other words, if there is weather right around the farm, you can't see it for noise.
... usually as high up as possible (but not too high), in a place that has as few places were the beam is blocked by terrain, where power and limited bandwidth can be had, etc. The studies done in the 1980's usually found that sweet spot, but it has just been taken away.
Here the real threat.
Lawyers for wind farms who know they have a nimby problem know that one of the arguments will be the interference problem. The lawyers have learned that NWS/DOD/FAA (the radars are a tri-agency project) usually leased the land for the radars in the late 1980s/early 1990's for either 20 or 25 years, so the leases are coming up for renewal.
In several recent cases, NWS/DOD/FAA have gone to the land holder to renew the lease only to find out the wind project has already leased the land for twenty years at 5x the rate of the government lease and get a notice the radar needs to be moved.
Now moving a WSR-88D costs upwards of a million bucks. They are VERY large and engineering studies have to be conducted to locate a good location
So the radar could end up being moved at high expense to a not as good location. While the radar is down (there aren't any spares), coverage may not be available.
that wind power is EVIL!
Solution - fix doppler radar so that it can distinguish between wind turbines and tornadoes. Might not be trivial, but certainly not rocket science. Wind turbines > tornado warnings
Hmmm.. They take up a LOT of real estate, muck up a perfectly beautiful horizon, require a large amount of huge power lines to be run all over private land, cost more to build and maintain than they produce, wreck havoc with radio/television reception anywhere around them, are loud, produce extremely annoying constant moving shadows, and now are showing to be a threat to to the one thing that helps NOAA try to save a few lives during severe weather? Nice... glad we invested all our tax dollars in those over-sized pieces of junk...
Having setup an ATC radar in Palm Springs, I can attest that the wind farms add a lot of noise to ATC radar systems as well as weather systems. Noise on the radar screen makes ATC more difficult, and increases the risk of accidents. The wind mills in Palm Springs are the small blade, fast moving type which birds like to fly into. I think the newer, larger wind farms are less of an issue for ATC radar. The slower moving blades can be filtered out. If they could build the windmills with flat edges, or use radar absorbing materials, they would become invisible to the radar.
.....after the number of Earth's wind mills reaches a certain critical population, the planet will fly away, leaving all air traffic in its wake.
Hebrews 11:8
Jeremiah 33:3
I can't believe they want to turn them off during bad weather. Wouldn't that be the most lucrative time for a windmill to gain energy?
Has the old saint in his forest not yet heard of it? That God is dead?
The UK MOD has been killing windfarms at the planning phase due to 'unspecified interference' with RADAR systems. Apparently they cause a blind spot directly above.
This perpetual motion machine Lisa made is a joke, it just keeps getting faster and faster. - Homer
Doppler radars in reasonably modern military systems can find hovering helicopters (doppler radars normally filters stationary objects) by detecting the rotating blades. Although weather radars operate in a different frequency range, the problem they have is effectively the same or actually the opposite - they want to mask the "helicopters".
..just thinking that if the local reported speed went from 40 to 300 then zero...might be a useful indicator of a twister there. ;)
Weather data reporting appears to be skewed a lot anyway, for instance we had those reports of temp sensors sitting in extreme hot spots in cities, etc. Not sure how much more data could be inputted to the collection points before it just gets to be too much noise..but seems like they could handle some more now given the advances in cheap computing power.
1. I find it absolutely impossible to believe that there's no cost-effective, technological solution to this problem. People upstream have mentioned the idea of putting remote cameras on the windmill towers, which seems quite reasonable.
2. Even if we can't, um... so freakin' what? It's not like false-alarm tornado warnings are such a big problem - what's the worst-case scenario? People spend more time in their basements than they really needed to? Note that I'm not buying any argument that this could lead to a "boy who cries wolf" scenario... tornado warnings are pretty routinely ignored anyway - because the false alarm rate is already kind of high. I seriously doubt that false alarms caused by wind farms would increase this by any significant amount.