Mitigation of Wind Turbine Clutter for Weather Radars Using Range-Doppler Domain Joint Interpolation in Low SNR Environments

Due to the exponential growth of the number and scale of wind farms, wind turbine clutter (WTC) has become the main factor that limits the detection performance of the weather radar systems. In this paper, a WTC mitigation algorithm using the tow-dimensional joint interpolation in range-Doppler domain is developed. The proposed algorithm firstly exploits the frequency-domain transformation technique to improve the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Then, the weather signal recovered by one-dimensional interpolation in range domain and Doppler domain are calculated respectively, and two-dimensional joint interpolation is performed based on the two-dimensional weighted coefficients calculated via a least mean squares criterion. Theoretical analysis and simulation results show that the proposed algorithm effectively suppresses the WTC, significantly improves the interpolation performance in low SNR environments.