Ground clutter may sound more like my son’s messy room than a weather word, but it can be just as frustrating. Not everything that shows up on weather radar is actually weather. Sometimes, what looks like rain or storms on a radar screen is really just a false echo, something known as ground clutter. It's the meteorological version of background noise.

Ground clutter happens when a radar beam hits objects close to the ground, like buildings, trees, hills, or even wind turbines, and reflects that signal back to the radar. Since the radar interprets returned signals as precipitation, these solid objects can confuse the system and show up as patches of rain or storms that aren’t actually there. They usually show up on the radar in red or blue, which can sometimes be confused as light rain.

Meteorologists are trained to recognize and filter out ground clutter, especially during calm weather when the radar is more likely to pick up these non-weather targets. It doesn’t move, unlike rain and storms that advance across. And the structure of the ground clutter usually looks different than when rain appears on the radar. Advances in radar technology have helped reduce clutter, but it still occasionally pops up, especially during sunrise and sunset when the radar beam can bend and bounce in unusual ways.

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Jennifer Gray is a weather and climate writer for weather.com. She has been covering some of the world's biggest weather and climate stories for the last two decades.