Airspace Datasets for Wind Developers
WIND Turbines and AVIATION
Due to their height, wind turbines present potential risk to aviation and aeronautical operations. As a result, all wind farms in the US must undergo an aeronautical study by the FAA to determine if each proposed turbine location will be a hazard to aviation.
These studies are typically performed late in project planning, leaving developers in a reactive position to either redesign their project layout, remove turbines from their plan, or cancel projects outright.
We want to help you avoid this inefficiency. We offer nationwide GIS datasets representing several of the aeronautical features that commonly lead to determinations of hazard for wind turbines. With these data in hand, you can proactively find and plan sites that have lower potential for airspace conflicts and higher likelihood of success.
Airspace Datasets
RootGeo offers datasets representing six aeronautical features key to evaluating the potential for hazards to aviation:
- Imaginary surfaces for civil airports (including FAR 77.19 and FAR 77.17(a)(2))
- Low altitude enroute airways and associated obstacle clearance surfaces
- Minimum Vectoring Altitude (MVA) Sectors and Obstacle Clearance Surfaces
- Minimum IFR Altitude (MIA) Sectors and Obstacle Clearance Surfaces
- Published Instrument Approach Procedures for Civil Airports
- Published Instrument Departure Procedures for Civil Airports
All datasets include attributes describing applicable altitude limits, are available nationwide for the US, and are provided in ready-to-use GIS data formats compatible with standard GIS software.
Imaginary Surfaces
Low-Altitude Enroute Airways
MVA Sectors
MIA Sectors
Instrument Approaches
Instrument Departures
ABOVE-GROUND LEVEL HEIGHT LIMITS
Last but not least, we synthesize data from all six of these aeronautical features into both individual and composite GIS raster datasets, showing you the height limit above ground at each location across the continental United States based on the applicable features and the elevation at each location.
The individual and composite raster datasets are ideal for regional- or national-scale site prospecting, helping you pick the best sites up front.
