Wind Farms Disrupting Radar, Scientists Say

Wind farms are supposed to produce the energy of tomorrow, but evidence indicates their countless whirring fan blades produce something else: "blank spots" that distort radar readings.

Now government agencies that depend on radar -- such as the Department of Defense and the National Weather Service -- are spending millions in a scramble to preserve their detection capabilities.

Spinning wind turbines make it hard to detect incoming planes. To avoid that problem, military officials have blocked wind farm construction near their radars -- and in some cases later allowed them after politicians protested.

Shepherd's Flat, a wind farm under construction in Oregon, was initially held up by a government notice that the farm would "seriously impair the ability of the (Defense Department) to detect, monitor and safely conduct air operations."

Dave Beloite, the director of the Department of Defense's Energy Siting Clearinghouse, told FOXNews.com that the project was given the green light by the military only after scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Lincoln Laboratory assured the Department of Defense "that there were algorithms and processors they could design for not too much money that would mitigate the problem."

Beloite said the MIT technology has proven successful in the last few months.

The fix the MIT scientists came up with tells the radar not to pay attention to signals in a very small area.

"You create a tiny blank spot [in the radar map] directly above the turbine," Beloite told FOXNews.com.

The fix for military radar does not work so well for weather forecasters, however.

"It's a lot easier to filter out interference for aviation," Ed Ciardi, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service Radar Operations Center in Norman, Okla., told FOXNews.com. "The real problem is when rain and the wind turbines are mixed together [on the radar map.] And it's all confusing … sometimes [forecasters] throw up their hands and say, 'who knows?'"

Ciardi said there have been occasional false alarms due to wind farm interference, but the Weather Service has not failed to issue any storm warnings yet.

"We're more worried about the future ... we've seen quite a few proposals for wind farms around our radars. And we have been ... trying to convince them to stay a good distance away," he said.

One strategy is to ask wind farm owners to turn off the propellers during storms. Another is to convince them to install devices that measure wind speeds and rainfall, so that there would no longer be much need for radar there.

"It all comes down to money and who's going to pay for it," he noted.

Meanwhile, top radar scientists are working on developing a fix that works for weather radar.

"It's slow progress, and they say it's extremely difficult -- that they need more money and more time. The solution, I would say, is probably five years down the road," Ciardi said.

Read more: FOX News