Simplified Formulae for the Estimation of Offshore Wind Turbines Clutter on Marine Radars

Abstract

The potential impact that offshore wind farms may cause on nearby marine radars should be considered before the wind farm is installed. Strong radar echoes from the turbines may degrade radars' detection capability in the area around the wind farm. Although conventional computational methods provide accurate results of scattering by wind turbines, they are not directly implementable in software tools that can be used to conduct the impact studies. This paper proposes a simple model to assess the clutter that wind turbines may generate on marine radars. This method can be easily implemented in the system modeling software tools for the impact analysis of a wind farm in a real scenario.