I received a phone call this week asking why there are two “blobs” persistently present on the Mayville Doppler Radar in Steele and Barnes counties. Those two areas the caller was referring to are wind farms. Although on-air and on our website we try to mask the so called ground clutter on the images we present, those two distinct areas are almost always present on the raw images found on the National Weather Service website and even occasionally on our images.
Wind towers are quite high, reaching 80 feet or higher on the landscape. If placed close enough to a radar site, the moving blades are detected as false precipitation echoes bouncing back to the radar. Given the right atmospheric conditions, other wind farms in our area can also be detected. All across the Great Plains, wind farms can be observed on radar, but because these areas are known by meteorologists they should not cause any problems with storm analysis.