Wind Farms Clocal Regions Of Global Warming

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Wind Farms Clocal Regions Of Global Warming, report says

Patricia Phillips' photo

Wind farms, an increasingly controversial type of energy resource, have been found to cause areas of small-scale global warming, a new study shows.

For eight years, Liming Zhou, an atmospheric scientist at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Albany, tracked the temperatures of land associated with four large wind farms in Texas. The results showed a marked increase in surface temperatures, especially at night.

"Our results show a significant warming trend of up to 0.72  degrees Centigrade per decade, particularly at night-time, over wind farms relative to nearby non-wind-farm regions. We attribute this warming primarily to wind farms," the study, published in Nature Climate Change, reported.

"We need to better understand the system with observations, and better describe and model the complex processes involved, to predict how wind farms may affect future weather and climate," Zhou said. In an interview with Discovery News, he added "I feel that wind farms, if spatially large enough, might have noticeable impacts on local to regional meteorology."

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The study noted that although the increase in temperatures could be attributed in some part to heat generated by the turbine footprint – the turbine blades, towers, access roads, etc. – the footprint took up only a small percentage of the land area of wind farms. Instead, it was likely that variations in wind speed, as well as fluctuations stirred up by turbines in the low part of the atmosphere, were largely responsible for the change.

While scientists discussed the data from the study, tycoon Donald Trump challenged the Scottish parliament over plans to build wind farms near Trump's new golf course development. Trump believes that wind farms will "destroy" tourism in Scotland.

"Scotland, if you pursue this policy of these monstrous turbines, Scotland will go broke," Trump declared in televised commentary. "They are ugly, they are noisy and they are dangerous."

On the scientific front, the study's authors believe that more research is required to predict the overall effect of large wind farms.

"The estimated warming trends only apply to the study region and to the study period, and thus should not be interpolated into other regions, globally or over longer periods," Zhou said. "For a given wind farm, once there are no new wind turbines added, the warming effect may reach a stable level."

Patricia Phillips, Science for Everyday Life Examiner

An award-winning journalist, author, and former NASA spokesperson, Patricia Phillips has written space, science, and human-interest articles for international markets since the 1970's. She's a skilled platform speaker and popular Native American story teller. Her poetry has appeared in...