Wind turbine clutter signature for maritime UHF radar

Abstract

Scattering signal variability due to wind turbine blade rotation usually degrades the performance of nearby radio systems, which severely inhibits the development of wind power installation. As for the maritime ultra-high frequency (UHF) radar, the wind turbine clutter (WTC) may mask small targets and increase the error of sea state measurement. In order to solve the problem from the radar side, a complete understanding of the WTC signature is needed. Using the data of a 10-day in-field experiment on the coast of Fujian Province of China, this paper studies the empirical characteristics of WTC in maritime UHF radar from several signal processing domains, including the time, frequency, space, and polarization domains. Several methods for detection and mitigation of WTC are proposed which are based on the unique characteristics of WTC, such as the time-periodicity, frequency expansion, space concentration, and much stronger magnitude than the ocean-scattered signals when both the transmitting and receiving antennas are horizontally polarized.

Keywords:

• wind turbine clutter
• maritime UHF radar
• signature
• time-frequency analysis
• polarization

Notes

We gratefully acknowledge the financial support from the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities [grant number 20420111163]; the Specialized Research Fund for the Doctoral Program of Higher Education [grant number 20090141120019]; the National Natural Science Foundation of China [grant number 61001186].