Modelling the impact of offshore wind farms on safety radars onboard Oil and Gas platforms

Radar Early Warning Systems (REWS) are safety critical radars installed onboard offshore Oil and Gas (O&G) platforms to monitor nearby surface traffic to provide asset and personnel protection and management. Wind turbines near REWS can interfere with the system due to their large and varying returns, radar shadows and overloading of the track table. This paper highlights some of the key parameters affecting the modeling of the potential interference on REWS. This paper will also present some modeling result for generic wind turbines nearfield scattering, simplified shadowing effects and finally a scenario to illustrate the compound effects on the REWS detection performance.