Wind Energy and its Effect on Local Weather and Climate

The need for clean, safe energy production has led to an accelerated deployment of windfarms around the world, including the eastern coast of the United States. An obvious question to ask is whether wind farms have an effect on the local microscale, mesoscale, and/or synoptic weather systems. The synoptic weather scale (large scale, cyclonic scale) is a horizontal length scale of the order of one thousand kilometers. Weather systems with this scale include extratropical cyclones, high and low pressure systems, and hurricanes. The mesoscale include systems with a length scale of five kilometers to hundreds of kilometers. These systems include sea breezes, squall lines, and convective thunderstorms. Microscale weather systems or features have a length scale smaller than five kilometers. Microscale systems include smaller clouds and breezes. These systems and features control the mixing and dilution processes in the atmosphere. Although this scale may seem unimportant, microscale meteorology studies processes such as heat transfer and gas processes involving soil, vegetation, surface water and the atmosphere caused.

Two avenues of research were followed in this study. The first avenue used computer modeling techniques to study weather patterns prior to the construction and operation of the three wind farms and compared them to weather patterns after the wind farms began producing power. The computer model used is the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) Model, This model simulates the structure of the atmosphere using historical data or present-day data for the initial conditions. This model was chosen for two reasons. First, it has a list of excellent features: two dynamical cores, a data assimilation system, a software architecture supporting parallel computation, and nested grids. The second avanue of research was to evaluate the historical weather records for areas with existing wind farms.