Removal of bird contamination in wind profiler signal spectra.

The problem of bird interference with radar performance is as old as radar itself; however, the problem specific to wind profiler operation has not drawn the attention of researchers until the last 5 or 6 years. Since then, the problem has been addressed in many publications and several ways to solve it have been indicated. Recent advances in radar hardware and software made the last generation of profilers much more immune to bird contamination. However, many older profilers are still in use; errors in averaged (hourly) winds due to bird interference may be as high as 15 m/s. The objective of the present study is to develop a practical method to derive mean winds from averaged spectral data of a 915-MHz wind profiler under the condition of bird contamination