HR: 0800h
AN: B41B-0452    [Abstracts]
TI: Wind farms and weather: the predictability of wind farm-induced changes in the downstream atmosphere.
AU: * Barrie, D
EM: dbarrie@atmos.umd.edu
AF: The University of Maryland Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Science, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, United States
AU: Kirk-Davidoff, D
AF: The University of Maryland Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Science, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, United States
AB: The installed wind power capacity worldwide has now exceeded 80 Gigawatts, 12 Gigawatts of which is located in the United States. The size of this capacity is growing at an accelerating rate due to an increasingly reasonable delivery price compared to other energy sources, and improvements in turbine technologies. In light of this growth, we have studied the potential impact that deliberate management of a large wind farm has on both regional climatology and the ability to modify a particular storm's strength and track. We illuminate the extent to which any such changes can be made predictably within a reasonable forecast timeframe. We also distinguish remote anomalies arising from spectral wave generation within the model during the first few time steps from significant anomalies caused by gravity wave propagation away from the wind farm site. Management of a wind farm would be performed in the field by altering the farm's effective roughness length through adjustment of the attitude of the turbine blades with respect to the wind direction. We will also present results that elucidate the dependence of a storm's downstream strength upon both the timing and magnitude of the surface roughness change. This project follows work by Kirk- Davidoff and Keith (2007) that demonstrated a significant extended regional effect on climatology through an alteration of surface roughness over a large area.
DE: 1631 Land/atmosphere interactions (1218, 1843, 3322)
DE: 1632 Land cover change
DE: 1637 Regional climate change
SC: Biogeosciences [B]
MN: 2007 Fall Meeting