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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."
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.
Exactly and then ignore the Doppler readings of that area, and instead take notice when a bunch of turbines suddenly go offline.
On the Oregon Cost born and raised, On the beach is where I spent most of my days
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.
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,
There are lots of objects that cause the same types of problems, including rotating radar antennas and buildings.
Yes, I heard this story last week at my local Fox affiliate, WFLD. The chief meteorologist stepped in at the end of the story and explained that there are lots of things that can cause these types of problems. He mentioned specifically that condensation from a cooling lake at a nearby nuclear power plant looks like a thunderstorm all of the time. But since they know about it, they can ignore it.
He concluded that he felt this story was blown out of proportion.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
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.