Abstract: Considering the spatiotemporal distribution of natural wind speed and the influence of wind shear and tower shadow effect,the influence of rotor mass imbalance fault on the electrical characteristics of DFIG wind turbines is analyzed in this paper. Firstly,the theoretical analysis of the fault characteristics is carried out,and the analytical expressions of the torque and stator current under the imbalance before and after consider the wind speed spatiotemporal distribution are derived,and the variation characteristics are summarized. Then the simulation on the MATLAB/Simulink platform was carried out to verify the theory. The theory and simulation results show that modulation frequencies of rotating frequency and 3 k（k=1,2,…,n）times of rotating frequency will exist in the stator current considering the influence of wind shear,tower shadow and wind speed spatiotemporal distribution,but mainly rotating frequency and triple rotating frequency. The fluctuations at 3 k times of rotating frequencies are caused by wind speed spatiotemporal distribution and their amplitudes do not change with the fault degree. In this paper, the equivalent wind speed is used instead of the average wind speed. The study is more suitable for the actual operation of the wind turbines in the natural and can provide reference for fault diagnosis in operation of wind turbines.