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Green wind farms disrupt weather and military radar

One of the things that Obama wants to leave as his legacy is a big push to more the country to green energy sources. One of the green power sources that are becoming increasingly common is wind farms that use giant windmills to generate electricity. The problem that the military and National Weather Service has found is that these wind farms interfere with radar.

You can see in the photo here that the wind farm in the area circled in yellow is distorting the weather radar making it impossible to tell if the storm indicated is real or turbulence from the massive windmills. According to the USAF, the wind farms also interfere with military radar and create a hole in coverage that makes it impossible to identify incoming aircraft.

The military has traditionally blocked wind farms from being placed near their radar installations. However, Senators in Oregon eventually forced the military to allow the installation of a wind farm near a radar station. The reason the military allowed the wind farm to go up was that MIT devised processors and a special algorithm that could remove the noise from the radar allowing it to functional normally. The MIT fix simply tells the radar to ignore signals in a small area. That fix won’t work for weather radar though.

[via Fox News]

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