The detection of wind-turbine noise in seismic records

Omar E. Marcillo, Joshua Carmichael

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

21 Scopus citations

Abstract

Large wind turbines (WTs) can produce noise that is observable at ground or atmosphere receivers up to 10 s of km from the source. Like other machinery with rotating blades (e.g., helicopters and large fans), WTs noise is often characterized by sharp spectral peaks at the blade passing frequency and its integer harmonics. Noise with these spectral characteristics, or tonal noise (TN), can be indistinguishable from typical seismic background noise because it is easily masked in noise studies after traditional smoothing algorithms and can therefore go undetected. Here, we describe and quantify a methodology to detect TN in seismic records by estimating spectral sequences in background noise. To test the performance of this algorithm, we analyze several years of seismic data recorded on two stations (AMTX and NATX) within the United States National Seismic Network (USNSN) in Texas. Station AMTX has a high concentration of WTs within 100 km and shows persistent TN detections with multiple well-defined fundamental frequencies between 0.7 and 1 Hz. NATX has the closest WT deployment at approximately 250 km and does not display any persistent detection, which provides a test for the algorithm in the absence of signal. Monthly detections at station AMTX follow the multiyear trend of statewide wind-generated electric power, which supports the assumption of the TN to be related to the operation of WTs. Our method will likely advance future monitoring challenges because WT proliferation spreads globally and such signatures will become increasingly present in seismic data.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)1826-1837
Number of pages12
JournalSeismological Research Letters
Volume89
Issue number5
DOIs
StatePublished - Sep 2018
Externally publishedYes

Funding

The authors sincerely thank two anonymous reviewers and Editor-in-Chief Zhigang Peng for their insightful comments and suggestions that improved earlier drafts of the article. This article has been authored by Los Alamos National Security under Contract Number DE-AC52-06NA25396 with the U.S. Department of Energy. The U.S. Government retains and the publisher, by accepting the article for publication, acknowledges that the U.S. Government retains a nonexclusive, paid-up, irrevocable, world-wide license to publish or reproduce the published form of this article, or allow others to do so, for U.S. Government purposes.

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