Innovative Signal Processing Techniques for Mitigation of Wind Turbine Farm Interference in Airborne Radar Systems

Detection and track processing in Navy AEW Radar is compounded by the rapidly increasing number of wind-farms comprised of multiple turbines. Turbine blades exhibit large reflectivity and occupy portions of the spatial/spectral domain that radar systems have to operate within in order to detect and track mission critical targets (stealthy aircraft, slow-moving drones, numerous surface targets). This mission requires the development of advanced interference-rejection, detection and track processing algorithms. The improved performance of these algorithms comes at a cost - the requirement to better understand all sources of interference. Upstate Scientific proposes to demonstrate an innovative and minimally intrusive Wind-farm Airborne Radar Processor (WARP), to be used for the mitigation of clutter created by the aforementioned wind-farms. The innovation arises in the selection of training data in spatial-temporal filtering, false alarm control, and track processing for the rejection of wind-farm caused clutter and the detection and track processing of targets.