| Development of wind turbines has increased with growing energy needs. Birds mortality rate is the most significant potential impact occurred due to the construction of wind turbines. Since then, radars have been deployed to study the behavior of birds towards wind turbines. Target tracking using radars has been used in order to detect targets (birds). Deployment of commercially available radars was not an option due to budget limitations. Therefore, this project was developed using marine radar and an open source software called radR and generate results comparable to commercially available radar systems. Generally two kinds of studies are conducted, pre deployment and post deployment of wind turbines. In this thesis pre deployment study over Lake Erie has been done. The primary goal of this study was to collect information on the migration characteristics of nocturnally migrating birds, during the Fall and Spring migration period. Specifically, the objective of this study was to collect baseline information on migration characteristics (i.e., flight direction, migration passage rates, and flight altitudes) of nocturnally migrating birds. This thesis also focuses on developing IMM algorithm for radR. The algorithm is tested on simulated data and real time data in radR to compare effects of the developed tracker models with the conventional methods in radR. The current tracker models in radR have maximum detection rates with equal false alarm rates. The new tracker model was implemented to reduce these error rates in the data processing. |
