When the exposure indicator shows a verdict for the Wind turbines source, it is comparing your current GPS spot to the closest turbine on record and applying a simple distance threshold. This tutorial walks through that logic.
The thresholds ClearSpot uses
- < 500 m - below France's legal minimum setback. Always flagged as "Not clear".
- 500 - 1,500 m - "Not clear" if you opted into the wind sensitivity. Health studies consistently report elevated annoyance and sleep disturbance in this band.
- > 1,500 m - "Clear" by default. The precautionary distance at which most reviewed studies see symptoms drop to background.
You can move the radius from 500 m up to 2,000 m from the cog menu if you are particularly sensitive to low-frequency noise, or if you want to apply the Bavarian 10H rule for 200 m-tall turbines.
Why 1,500 m and not 500 m
France's 500 m limit was drafted in 2011 for turbines that rarely exceeded 120 m at tip. The current generation tops 230 m and sweeps far larger volumes of air, producing more low-frequency content. The WHO's 2018 European Noise Guidelines conclude that current setbacks "should be reassessed" against this newer hardware.
The 1,500 m default is conservative: it flags zones where the peer-reviewed evidence still finds statistically significant annoyance, without leaning on the contested infrasound literature.
What the verdict actually means
"Not clear" does not mean "dangerous". It means the nearest documented turbine is closer than the distance at which most studies report symptoms dropping to baseline. If you never notice the turbine, the verdict is just a heads-up, not a diagnosis.
Your sensitivity, your distance
Legal minima (such as 500 m in France) are regulatory lines in the landscape, not predictions of how you will feel. ClearSpot defaults to 1,500 m because that is the distance range where the reviewed epidemiology still often finds extra annoyance and sleep impacts for a fraction of the population. If you are less sensitive, widen the radius; if you are more sensitive, bring it in as far as 500 m, the floor the sensitivity panel allows.
Example: the exposure row and modal
Open the bottom exposure chip, expand the panel, then tap Wind turbines. The modal lists the closest documented machine and the great-circle distance. The footer link is worded to help you interpret turbine distance, not a generic marketing label. If your alert distance is 1,500 m and the nearest turbine is 1,100 m away, the row should read Alert because the hazard distance you picked is being crossed.
Composite environmental burden (0-100) on the same chip
When several sources are active, the chip also shows a 0-100 environmental burden score. Each source yields a value between 0 and 1 depending on how close the reading is to your thresholds, then the app multiplies by fixed weights (air 0.30, pollen 0.22, wind 0.18, noise 0.18, light 0.12) and sums. It is a quick relative index, not a medical diagnosis, and you can ignore it if you only care about one pollutant.
The separate combined map overlay (air + pollen + light) uses a different rule: for each selected layer it computes how much your personal ceiling is exceeded, then keeps the largest of those three signals so you always see the worst offender driving the colour. That is why the heatmap can look harsher on one module than the 0-100 number on the chip.
Data freshness for turbines
The registry is refreshed on our side every night, but upstream ministries only publish new parks or repowering events on their own schedule. A turbine that went online this week can therefore lag by a day or two; a dismantled site may still appear until the next national dump is available.
Data source
ClearSpot loads the Parcs eoliens terrestres registry
published by data.gouv.fr
(French Ministry of Ecology). We refresh the dataset nightly, keep
hub height and manufacturer when available, and compute the
distance to the closest turbine using an exact great-circle
formula. Locations outside France rely on OpenStreetMap's
power=generator feature layer until a local registry
is added.