This page displays images of echo statistics at wind farms, created using program package by Donaldson and Patterson. The "raw program" runs a URP module to extract PPI's of reflectivity and a second program gathers up 5 day summaries of the META files for a particular URP product (here URPPPI for DBT and DBZ) and builds distributions of observed reflectivities at every pixel. The analysis program gathers up weekly distributions for all weeks starting in a particular year/month and derives multiple statistics: mean reflectivity, median reflectivity, mean rainfall rate (MP), percent of NULL observations, percentage of observations above a threshold, etc. The results are in polar coordinates and can be output to a URP META file.

Here the URPGraphics program has been used to output the monthly statistcs on a latitude-longitude grid centred on each farm. Two types of products are shown: the mean rain rate for the month (based on Marshall Palmer) and the percentage of the time an observation exceeds a certin reflectivity. The mean rain rate plots have differring upper limits to the colour table. Note that some wind farms are seen in summer but rarely in winter, so a blank image in one month may have non-trivial data in another month.

The background maps show geographic features (blue), roads (red) and power corridors (magenta). At higher resolutions white crosses show locations of individual wind turbines, but at lower resolutions those crosses would completely hide the data.

The display is not particularly smart, so the user needs to select consistent combinations: the mean rate statistics` must match product of "rain rate" and the "percent above" statistics must match product of DBZ or DBT.

Also note that I haven't made all possible combinations and some wind farms have fewer combinations than others. (I add new combinations and then need to redo wind farms with the new configuration and remember to upload images to this server.)

These plots were made in two versions with and without a modified conversion of range/azimuth to bin/ray using an ellisoid rather than a sphere. The change places point targets more correctly, at least for turbines reasonably close to a radar. The operational URPGraphics uses a spherical Earth in its geographic projection which results in too large an over-the-Earth distance for a radar range; range bins are plotted too far away.