WOODSTOCK, Maine — An apparent intense snow squall that appeared on National Weather Service radar maps over Woodstock on Thursday night was nothing more than radar pulse from the weather station in Gray bouncing off wind turbines on Spruce Mountain.
Although many in Oxford County saw a brief snow squall late Thursday evening that left a dusting on the roads, National Weather Service weather radar maps showed intense snow squalls in a small areas. The sites coincided with wind turbines, such as the 10 on Spruce Mountain and 28 on Mars Hill in Aroostook County.
“It’s an issue nationwide with all sorts of wind farms,” said Margaret Curtis, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Gray.
The problem, she said, is that the radar pulse sent out from Gray that is meant to bounce off raindrops also bounces off mountains and turbines.
The radar is sending out 300 to 1,300 pulses per second, which means it can sometimes pick up migrations of birds on a clear day that show up as weather phenomena on the map.
The meteorologists can easily distinguish whether a stationary mountain is causing what they call “ground clutter,” but it is sometimes a little more difficult with moving targets such as wind turbines until they know their exact location, she said.
Once they realize the cause of the disturbance, the weather patches could be filtered out by repositioning the radar higher.
Distributed by MCT Information Services
False images aren’t as bad as false promises from the out of state owners of these rigs that are scarring our beautiful Maine landscape.
RIGHT ON! If I was “King for a day” I would eliminate every last
one of those beasts and never allow another one in this state!
I dont hear too many coming to the rescue of these windmills, not even the green wienies will defend them….
Wind farms are producing 5% of Maine’s electricity and eliminating 400,000 tonnes of carbon emissions each year.
http://www.power-eng.com/news/2012/11/29/wind-energy-in-maine-eliminates-400-000-metric-tons-of-global-warming-pollution-annually.html
Mountains, birds, turbines and other ground clutter are filtered out of the radar data – this is not a “problem”.
Please try to keep up.
Yessah
Are you looking across the lake at a line of turbines from a $400,000.00 investment you’ve made in your dream retirement home? I thought so….
Actually, I can see the Woodstock turbines from my camp – I think they are beautiful.
And every time I look at them, they are in motion.
Yessah
And the power they produce is helping to heat my home. Thank you very much.
Not many of us can afford a $400,000 home. You won’t find a lot of sympathy for that.
There are thousands of expensive seasonal homes in Maine that are owned by Mainers and out of state folks. Most don’t have kids attached that crowd local schools.You don’t mind the taxes they pay that help to lower ours do you? I know the turbines pay taxes as well-they just look like hell in lots of places.I’m glad someone like them though…
PTC is going down , SO Sorry Wind Shill!
Environment Maine is a statewide, citizen-based environmental advocacy
organization.Yep I would believe everything this group says, no agenda there. Want to save the earth…go back to hydro. That actually produce power 24-7-365. Not only that it, doesn’t depend on tax dollars to stay running.
Hydro is the way to go for sure, Maine has so much water, use it….
Then I’m sure you’ve expressed thoese same sentiments to the oil industry, the one that continues to receive subsidies as they have for years, and paid for by the tax we all pay at the pump. But of course, you knew that, too
Well at least there is ONE green wienie coming to their rescue.
Never mind repostioning the radar. Repostion the windmills in the Dolby landfill. Get real. Get hydro!
“The sites coincided with wind turbines, such as the 10 on Spruce Mountain and 28 on Mars Hill”… Oh, Lord, another reason to tear them down! I feel the pulsing…
The pulsing is from the weather radar, not from the wind mills.
Bring back the coal and nuke plants. We want our power, we just don’t want to see it produced. Btw, I gotta go finish my polar bear stew.
Scooter, coal and nuke plants produce base load power. Neither can or will be replaced or displaced by wind generators, which produce part-time add-on power. Yes, wind power makes no smoke. But that does not make it useful or necessary.
For those of you disparaging the wind generators I would love to be able to show you what I see outside my window: Thousands of eighteen-wheelers on our little two lane black top, oil rigs as far as you can see, dozens of burn pipes lighting up the night and stinking up the day, all of the green pastures and brush land bulldozed under for industrial use, rigs pumping foul carcinogenic water underground with no guarantee it will not contaminate our aquifer, and people, people and more people, many of them not nice. This is what I see out my window. You should be thankful for your wind generators.
Fear not, Kathy. They are trying their best to put a 23 million gallon, 220′ diameter propane storage tank that’s 14 stories tall here in Searsport, ME. Maybe they should put up a few wind turbines at the same time. The tank could block the view of them.
Oh please Kathy and Big Kid. Oil produced less than one half of one percent of Maine’s electricity generation last year. Nationwide it was under 1%. Vilify oil on its own all you want. But you are not allowed to vilify oil as justification for wind. They are apples and oranges.
The wind industry’s playbook says to attack oil, when in fact they know fully well it is an entirely false argument, but one that panders to people’s sentiments. As you point out, we don’t use oil to make electricity. Moreover, we don’t use electricity to drive or heat, which is what we do use oil for.
If we ever went to “an all electric society” where heating and driving were powered by electricity, the very last source we would use is wind given its unreliability, astronomic price and lack of grid scale storage, said to be 50 years off by many of the experts.
This is nothing more than a few insiders bilking the taxpayer, hiding behind a supposed higher moral ground. Confidence gaming 101.
Kinda like we can fix everything by taxing just the rich.
No, oil didn’t produce it…..coal did. And it’s not anywhere that you could see it from any vantage point in Maine. But, it sure as hell is visible by the neighbors that live near those plants. And the workers that make their living in those holes. Born and raised in Western PA, I had several relatives that were miners and have seen first hand the ugliness of that industry. We may need it, for sure, but we can certainly be working towards weaning ourselves from that diet. How about we compare the carbon footprint of wind and oil..Still ready to talk apples and oranges. I am.
And the flip side of that was the sight of hundreds of wind turbines as I recently drove to my next job site in Bloomington, IL. On another trip to a project in Kentucky, I rounded a bend on the Interstate to be greated by a sign welcoming me to Kentucky…and a refinery the likes of which closely matches your description. I could not agree with you more, Kathy!
“I rounded a bend on the Interstate.” Unless you were riding a horse, ya need to thank the refinery for the gas that got you there.
Where are you???
Fake images from a fake industry.
Wait for the PTC to die, then so will this false industry.
OK, folks, how much trouble are we talking? Update the databases, the maps and the programs. What are they waiting for?
These “wind machines” were supposed to save everyone so much money on their electric bills, well, where are the savings, my electric bill hasn’t gone anywhere but higher over the past couple years, and we’re using the same amount of electric. go figure!
Transmission rates just jumped 19.6% on July 1 all due to wind turbines. The wind industry quietly got the ratepayer to build them the new lines thanks to corrupt politicians and a corrupt PUC. The former PUC chairman who set this rate hike in motion took over $1 million in stock options from First Wind while at the PUC and then joined the wind company. If the public continues to sleep, one day they will have nothing. Don’t count on the media. The BDN never even reported this rate hike to their readers.
Want to start learning about this rate hike and the underbelly of this Enron-created industry? Just Google:
“What Every Maine Ratepayer Needs to Know”
Can you imagine… The weather predictions are being messed up by turbines that we are subsidizing. Slowly but surely we are committing industrial suicide. What a foolish society we are!
Let’s see…. The wind farms want to create an ATV and snowmobile trail across Maine, connecting all the wind projects, leaving a line of radar with false images, allowing unknown aircraft to travel unseen, so why are we not addressing the national security levels that these wind farms are creating. Also, to those of you that are curious enough, check out the readings and you will have a basic idea of the sound and how it interferes with the residents. It is quite a broad band of interference. The industry would like you to think it is just the blades, but the interference goes beyond the blades
It would seem we have quite a panel of “experts” expressing their cast in stone statistics AGAINST alternative energy sources and their viability. I would suggest hearing their collective results of studies of the following countries that, in spite of the “can’t be done” attitude existing here, have proven quite the opposite. Let’s start with Iceland, which currently boasts 100% of their electricity sourced by alternative and green means and methods. Please save your immediate rationalization that “size matters”. That wasn’t part of your original justification, nor is it hardly reason to simply not invest in making the change. The other’s are Germany, Sweden, Denmark and Norway. We are all anxiously awaiting your learned observations and results.
Industrial wind turbines have been the focus of national security for several years now due to their influence on radar detection systems employed by both civilian airports and our military installations. The turbines also impact seismological data through vibrations they send into the ground. If we carpet the country with these things, “flying under the wind turbines” will become the new enemy mantra.