Wind Turbine Clutter Suppression for Weather Radars by Improved Range-Doppler Domain Joint Interpolation in Low SNR Environments

Abstract

Due to the exponential growth of the number and scale of wind farms, wind turbine clutter has become the main factor that limits the detection performance of weather radar systems. As a consequence of the rapid rotation of wind turbine blades, conventional ground clutter filters are ineffective at removing wind turbine clutter (WTC). An improved range-Doppler joint interpolation for WTC suppression is proposed in this paper. The proposed algorithm firstly exploits the frequencydomain transformation technique to improve the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), so that the interpolation algorithm can recover the weather signal in the case of low SNR. Then, the weather signals recovered by one-dimensional interpolation in range domain and Doppler domain are calculated, respectively, and the two-dimensional joint interpolation is performed based on two-dimensional weighted coefficients calculated via a least mean squares criterion. Theoretical analysis and simulation results show that the proposed algorithm effectively suppresses the wind turbine clutter and significantly reduces the bias in radial velocity estimation caused by WTC contamination in low SNR environments.