Spectral Polarimetric Filter Design for Wind Turbine Clutter Suppression

Abstract

Nowadays, there is an intensive use of wind turbines worldwide to generate green and renewable energy. In addition, the sizes of wind turbines keep increasing for higher efficiency. However, echoes from wind turbines are severe clutter for weather radar, deteriorating its performance significantly. In this work, the spectral polarimetric filters (SPFs) are designed to mitigate wind turbine clutter (WTC). The SPFs consist of the moving double spectral linear depolarization ratio (MDsLDR) filter [1] and the object-orientated spectral polarimetric (OBSpol) filter [2], which have been previously proposed to mitigate the narrow-band clutter (both stationary and moving) for polarimetric radar with and without cross-polar measurements, respectively. Data collected by a polarimetric Doppler weather radar known as the IRCTR Drizzle Radar (IDRA) are used to validate the performance of the proposed algorithm. Mounted on the top of a 213m tower in Cabauw Experimental Site for Atmospheric Research, the Netherlands, the X-band operational research radar is still affected by wind turbines which are 120m in height and 3400m far away. Different case studies demonstrate the good performance of the SPFs in sidelobe WTC suppression. Moreover, these filters can be applied in real time due to its low computation complexity.