Hydrologic Implications of Wind Farm Effect on Radar-Rainfall Observations

Despite efforts to detect and mitigate wind farm clutter in weather radar observations of rainfall, these signatures propagate to quantitative precipitation estimates. In this study, the authors investigate the hydrologic impact of wind farm clutter in the Multi-Radar Multi-Sensor rainfall products. The study uses the probability of detection method to identify wind farm clutter in data from Iowa for the years 2016 and 2017. Using the physically based distributed hydrologic model called the Hillslope-Link Model, the authors show that streamflow (flood) prediction errors are generally significant at smaller basin communities where wind farms occupy a large portion of the upstream basins. These errors due to wind farm clutter show systematic decrease with the basin scales. The results from this study have implications for real-time streamflow forecasts provided automatically by the National Water Model at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, particularly at small riverine communities.