NOTE: An update has been added below, using the press release that came out today after the news stories yesterday.
While ironic that something designed to reduce CO2 emissions (and presumably warming)is actually producing warming around it, this isn’t really any big surprise. Orchardists and vineyard operators in California have been using motor driven wind turbines to elevate local temperatures to save crops from frost for over half a century. What is different here is the scale of nighttime warming, large enough to be visible on MODIS satellite imagery thanks to large scale wind farms.
Dr. Roger Pielke Sr. and associates have been doing research along these lines for quite some time, and has this summary on some recent research.
From Louise Gray in the Telegraph:
Wind farms can cause climate change, according to new research, that shows for the first time the new technology is already pushing up temperatures.
Usually at night the air closer to the ground becomes colder when the sun goes down and the earth cools. But on huge wind farms the motion of the turbines mixes the air higher in the atmosphere that is warmer, pushing up the overall temperature.
Satellite data over a large area in Texas, that is now covered by four of the world’s largest wind farms, found that over a decade the local temperature went up by almost 1C as more turbines are built. This could have long term effects on wildlife living in the immediate areas of larger wind farms. It could also affect regional weather patterns as warmer areas affect the formation of cloud and even wind speeds.
Full story here:
Here’s the paper:
Zhou, Liming, Yuhong Tian, Somnath Baidya Roy, Chris Thorncroft, Lance F. Bosart and Yuanlong Hu 2012: Impacts of wind farms on land surface temperature. Nature Climate Chnage. doi:10.1038/nclimate1505
And the abstract (bold mine):
The wind industry in the United States has experienced a remarkably rapid expansion of capacity in recent years and this fast growth is expected to continue in the future. While converting wind’s kinetic energy into electricity, wind turbines modify surface–atmosphere exchanges and the transfer of energy, momentum, mass and moisture within the atmosphere. These changes, if spatially large enough, may have noticeable impacts on local to regional weather and climate.
Here we present observational evidence for such impacts based on analyses of satellite data for the period of 2003–2011 over a region in west-central Texas, where four of the world’s largest wind farms are located. Our results show a significant warming trend of up to 0.72 °C per decade, particularly at night-time, over wind farms relative to nearby non-wind-farm regions. We attribute this warming primarily to wind farms as its spatial pattern and magnitude couples very well with the geographic distribution of wind turbines.
h/t to WUWT reader Andrew Kissling
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UPDATE: 4/30/12:30PM PST The press release came out this morning, including this image:
Temperature Differences near Wind Farms
This graph shows the night-time land surface temperature differences near wind farms between 2010 and 2013. Credit: Liming Zhou et al., Nature Climate Change
Here’s the PR:
Scientists find night-warming effect over large wind farms in Texas
Wind turbines interact with atmospheric boundary layer near the surface
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  IMAGE:Wind farms are numerous in parts of Texas; scientists report new results on their effects.Click here for more information. |
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Large wind farms in certain areas in the United States appear to affect local land surface temperatures, according to a paper published today in the journal Nature Climate Change.
The study, led by Liming Zhou, an atmospheric scientist at the State University of New York- (SUNY) Albany, provides insights about the possible effects of wind farms.
The results could be important for developing efficient adaptation and management strategies to ensure long-term sustainability of wind power.
“This study indicates that land surface temperatures have warmed in the vicinity of large wind farms in west-central Texas, especially at night,” says Anjuli Bamzai, program director in the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Division of Atmospheric and Geospace Sciences, which funded the research.
“The observations and analyses are for a relatively short period, but raise important issues that deserve attention as we move toward an era of rapid growth in wind farms in our quest for alternate energy sources.”
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 IMAGE:This graph shows the night-time land surface temperature differences near wind farms between 2010 and 2013.Click here for more information. |
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Considerable research has linked the carbon dioxide produced by burning fossil fuels with rising global temperatures.
Consequently, many nations are moving toward cleaner sources of renewable energy such as wind turbines. Generating wind power creates no emissions, uses no water and is likely “green.”
“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,” said Zhou.
There have been a growing number of studies of wind farm effects on weather and climate, primarily using numerical models due to the lack of observations over wind farms.
As numerical models are computationally intensive and have uncertainties in simulating regional and local weather and climate, said Zhou, remote sensing is likely the most efficient and effective way to study wind farm effects over larger spatial and longer temporal scales.
To understand the potential impact of wind farms on local weather and climate, Zhou’s team analyzed satellite-derived land surface temperatures from regions around large wind farms in Texas for the period 2003-2011.
The researchers found a night-time warming effect over wind farms of up to 0.72 degrees Celsius per decade over the nine-year-period in which data were collected.
Because the spatial pattern of warming mirrors the geographic distribution of wind turbines, the scientists attribute the warming primarily to wind farms.
The year-to-year land surface temperature over wind farms shows a persistent upward trend from 2003 to 2011, consistent with the increasing number of operational wind turbines with time.
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 IMAGE:Wind farms dot the horizon in Lubbock County and other Texas areas.Click here for more information. |
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“This warming effect is most likely caused by the turbulence in turbine wakes acting like fans to pull down warmer near-surface air from higher altitudes at night,” said Somnath Baidya Roy of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, a co-author of the paper.
While the warming effect reported is local and small compared to the strong background year-to-year land surface temperature variation, the authors believe that this work draws attention to an important scientific issue that requires further investigation.
“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.”
The study represents a first step in exploring the potential of using satellite data to quantify the possible effects of the development of big wind farms on weather and climate, said Chris Thorncroft of SUNY-Albany, a co-author of the paper.
“We’re expanding this approach to other wind farms,” said Thorncroft, “and building models to understand the physical processes and mechanisms driving the interactions of wind turbines and the atmosphere boundary layer near the surface.”
Other authors of the paper include Lance Bosart at SUNY-Albany, Yuhong Tian of NOAA, and Yuanlong Hu at Terra-Gen Power LLC in San Diego, Calif.
An idea:
Wind make changes in climate, this article shows it.
There is a weekly change in climate in some places, weekends are different.
This is blamed on aerosols, which is convenient for the warmists, since in gets them off the kook for the lack of warming.
That way, if they can’t get you for CO2, they can get you for creating aerosols, they have you coming and going.
On weekdays, cars rush around to and from work etc, this creates some wind.
This wind may change the climate just like wind farms, or at least somewhat.
Therefore, this article shows that aerosols may be off the hook, completly or partially.
And this is not even counting the other things that could cause this weekly change, such as the heat from all that combustion going on in those cars.
There is no extra heat produced. Under clear skies the surface temperature will drop and create an inversion. Cloudy skies or wind (or turbulence created by wind or turbines) will result in a higher temperature overnight, That is all the study shows.
I knew an owner of a grape growing operation in Ontario who would fly his old airplane early in the morning when there was a danger of frost.
Connolly’s blog is so poor that no one goes there. He has to come here to get any discussion.
The Welchman says:
“I’m here to help educate your people…”
That’s like a Phrenologist claiming to be able to help educate brain surgeons.
wayne says:
April 30, 2012 at 6:26 pm
wmc: “Don’t try to teach your grandmother to suck eggs, you wet-behind-the-ears puppy.”
Anthony, Wikipedia, as loose some of it’s information is, will not even have William M. Connolley spewing his bad science information laced with insults…. so why is he here? For enlightenment to see how bad AGW badness can get?
>>>>>>>>
Yes! Everytime I see wmc drawn into discussion of the actual science, he makes a fool of himself, like his comment upthread where he seems to think that putting buildings on land reduces the surface area that can “see” the sky by the area of the building. Highly instructive for those new to the discussion.
[Please provide a legitimate email address. ~dbs, mod.]
Let Connolly post. I need a good belly laugh before going off to bed. Plus it gives me added faith in the educated people who post here from all viewpoints. I am getting a great education in my retirement … Thank you for this open site.
> You write a Stoat post about how stupid we are, citing Policy Lass
Well no, not quite. Here
it is, and I said “The Policy Lass is sick of arguing with stupid people. Anyone who has been to WUWT and the comment threads there will empathise.” And yes, there are indeed stupid people here, but you aren’t all stupid. Otherwise i wouldn’t be bothering.
> “unthinking”. Mr. Connolley
Ah, well, there you go.
> Here’s the Wiki history page for “global warming” http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Global_warming&action=history
OK, great. GW is the canonical argued-about climate page at wiki, if you can’t find churn there you have no hope.
But you’ve been mislead but just counting numbers of changes, many of which were minor. Try just looking at the diff from the first to the last of the changes you present:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Global_warming&diff=489632183&oldid=485137534
And of that, essentially all that change happened in one edit (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Global_warming&diff=487162731&oldid=486809180). There is, at the moment, very little change overall, in this or indeed any of the other important climate pages. And that isn’t terribly
surprising, because there isn’t much in the way of news at the moment. I appreciate that the internal workings of wiki aren’t easy to understand from the outside; but you’re doing your readers a disservice by putting them off helping.
Darren Potter says> No doubt, Global Warming experts all have our best interests at heart
Not at all. I’m here to talk about the science, not the economics or the politics.
Smokey says:> …Connolley’s … “17) . . (→See also: There were two coppies [sic] of the link to Terraforming, both were spelled incorrectly.)”
Well, I knew I was important – that’s obvious. But I hadn’t realised I was so important that a trivial typo in a checkin comment raises to the level of notability.
Anthony> For a real eye opener, see this Wikipedia page about Connolley and what they think about him and what actions have been taken http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Climate_change#Climate_change:_discretionary_sanctions But I’m sure he’ll insist that I’ve “made it up”.
Sorry, missed that one earlier. No, that page is real, of course. But so is this.
> I submitted the original page on the Climate Reference Network to Wikipedia in April 2008
This is a bit confusing… did you mean http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_Reference_Network (that is what I assumed; it shows no trace of you) or did you mean http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_Climate_Reference_Network (which a user called Wattsupwiththat created http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=US_Climate_Reference_Network&oldid=207475281)?
I would naturally assume the latter, except it doesn’t fit the rest of what you say, because the article is now substantially as you created it (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=US_Climate_Reference_Network&diff=451969712&oldid=207475281).
I don’t think the article was ever deleted. There was a speedy-delete tag put up (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=US_Climate_Reference_Network&diff=218274964&oldid=210818251) because you’d cut-n-pasted stuff from outside, but it was rejected (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=US_Climate_Reference_Network&diff=218290612&oldid=218274964) because what you’d copied was a work of the US govt, and therefore OK.
As far as I can tell, that was your only contribution: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Wattsupwiththat
> It was then promptly deleted by one of the pseudonym named climate bullies you cavort with. My crime was using my own name….because well, we just can’t have that awful Watts person submitting to Wikipedia.
As I say, I can’t see any evidence that it was deleted. I think you mistook the speedy-delete notice for actual deletion.
Stephen Rasey says:> … Wikipedia on is the history page… But that only works when the root page continues to exist.
As far as I can see, that page does exist (aside: even if the page is deleted, the history remains visible to admins, and can be restored if needed).
> Your description of what happened to the “Climate Reference Network” page illustrates the Achilles’ Heel of Wikipedia
In this case it looks like AW may have erred. Wiki wins again!
REPLY: Actually we both erred, but you won’t admit your error.
1. Mr. Connolley erred in claiming I’ve never contributed to Wikipedia.
[ >What do you mean, “any more”? You never have; and I doubt any of the folks here have. You’d rather sit on the sidelines carping, and inventing excuses for not making things better.]
To paraphease his favorite line, he “made that up”.
2. I erred in not checking again after getting the “speedy deletion” notice, because it caused me to be disgusted with the entire Wikipedia process. Why participate if one person’s opinion can trigger a deletion? Given the behavior problems there, I didn’t bother to even contest it. Why waste my time with anonymous cowards with an agenda?
I think this admonishment from Wikipedia sums up your behavior there quite well, as well as my (and others) reticence for active participation:
William M. Connolley previously sanctioned and desysopped
8.1) In the Abd-William M. Connolley arbitration case (July–September 2009), William M. Connolley was found to have misused his admin tools while involved. As a result, he lost administrator permissions, and was admonished and prohibited from interacting with User:Abd. Prior to that, he was sanctioned in Requests for arbitration/Climate change dispute (2005, revert parole – which was later overturned by the Committee here) and Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/Geogre-William M. Connolley (2008, restricted from administrative actions relating to Giano II). He was also the subject of RFC’s regarding his conduct: RfC 1 (2005) and RfC 2 (2008). The 2008 RFC was closed as improperly certified.
Passed 6 to 0 with 2 abstentions, 14:10, 14 October 2010 (UTC)
William M. Connolley has been uncivil and antagonistic
8.2) William M. Connolley has been uncivil and antagonistic to editors within the topic area, and toward administrators enforcing the community probation. (Selection of representative examples:[6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16] [17][18][19] [20] )
This uncivil and antagonistic behaviour has included refactoring of talk page comments by other users,(examples:[21][22][23] ) to the point that he was formally prohibited from doing so. In the notice advising him that a consensus of 7 administrators had prohibited his refactoring of talk page posts, he inserted commentary within the post of the administrator leaving the notice on his talk page.[24]] For this action, he was blocked for 48 hours; had the block extended to 4 days with talk page editing disabled due to continuing insertions into the posts of other users on his talk page; had his block reset to the original conditions; then was blocked indefinitely with talk page editing disabled when he again inserted comments into the posts of others on his talk page.[25] After extensive discussion at Administrator noticeboard/Incidents, the interpretation of consensus was that the Climate Change general sanctions did not extend to the actions of editors on their own talk pages, and the block was lifted.
Passed 8 to 0, 14:10, 14 October 2010 (UTC)
William M. Connolley’s edits to biographies of living persons
8.5) William M. Connolley has focused a substantial portion of his editing in the Climate change topic area on biographical articles about living persons who hold views opposed to his own with respect to the reality and significance of anthropogenic global warming, in a fashion suggesting that he does not always approach such articles with an appropriately neutral and disinterested point of view.
Passed 7 to 1, 14:10, 14 October 2010 (UTC)
So, after viewing what you are attempting to do with your own blog and interactions here, careful personal consideration, and discussions with other moderators about your behavior at WUWT, it has been decided that like Wikipedia, after 367 Connolley comments and responses, you have been dis-invited from further commentary here. The reason is that you have summarily and regularly violated WUWT policy. While on one hand you have made some valid points, on the other, your behavior here (with follow up taunting on your blog) is serially mendacious, disruptive, dismissive, insulting, and condescending, and as I’ve pointed out the threads Mr. Connolley visits get hijacked by his interaction, making them about him and his taunts. In essence, as you’ve demonstrated on Wikipedia, your participation here is not in good faith either.
To quote WOPR: “The only winning move is not to play.” This is how I feel about Wikipedia and your participation there, and after weighing all the factors, and your participation here. We won’t be playing Mr. Connelley’s war games here anymore. – Anthony Watts
So where is the warming? Is it ‘over’ the wind farms? Is it ‘around’ the wind farms? Or is it the land surface? Effectively below the wind farms.
As the discussion above shows, which of these it is indicates completely different mechanisms at work.
Climate science has a general problem with vague or poorly phrased claims, but this is worse than usual.
The study itself, which might be more enlightening, is paywalled.
His results of ” a significant warming trend of up to 0.72 °C per decade” are most likely meaningless because the measurement period probably corresponds with the construction period for the wind farm. When construction finishes the temperature rise relative to the surrounding area will level off (assuming that the wind farm remains operational).
The real question should be what effect the redistribution of energy and increase in turbulence has on cloud formation and precipitation downwind of these massive wind farms.
Hmm, this is trash. I would delete it. 0.7Celsius per decade makes no sense. It isn’t going to get warmer and warmer forever. It will just get warmer after the windfarm is put into operation.
Naturally there will be slight warming because the wind is giving up its energy. Somewhere else must be getting slighlty cooler. It’s all entropy. Big deal.
Sorry for the segueway Anthony, but I just wanted to note that the reason I became interested in Climate science, and then became a skeptic is because of William Connolley. Before even CG1 or 2 came about, the antics of Connolley were making news as reputable studies were being peverted, valid data corrupted, and lies told as facts.
That his blog is seldom visited is a symptom of that. That he continues doubling down on his denials of culpability, and then treating readers as stupid (that they cannot read and understand his simple words), only reinforces my belief that AGW is no longer science, but a rellgion of heretics. So let him post. He is your best resource for the truth, because anything he posts, we know is a fabrication.
He is a sad little man. Still looking for that 15 minutes he lost years ago.
Charlie says:
April 30, 2012 at 7:33 am
“Overall, the warming effect reported in this study is local and is small compared to the strong background year-to-year land surface temperature changes. -> Very likely, the wind turbines do not create a net warming of the air and instead only re-distribute the air’s heat near the surface <-, which is fundamentally different from the large-scale warming effect caused by increasing atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases”.
From the caption graph:
This graph shows the night-time land surface temperature differences near wind farms between 2010 and 2013. Credit: Liming Zhou et al., Nature Climate Change
Do you guys know where I can get the may 2012 through January 1 2013 data — I would like to have a look in advance to enhance my futures trading activity. 🙂
I think these scientists are correct that wind farms increase temperatures. But I think they have confused the reason.
Stand in front of a fan at any time to understand the truth of this. Get out of a shower, feel how warm you are. Now, stand in front of a fan. You will notice your temperature dropping a great deal!
So there you have it. These wind farms will slow down the wind, which is an important factor in cooling the earth. Slowing down the wind even a tiny amount will increase global temperatures. These wind farms must be stopped!
I’m certain in five years from now, Al Gore’s son will tell us the consequences of relying on Wind power, that Solar has destroyed our deserts, and the only way to get good power is hamsters on a hamster wheel. But only one hamster per household, because the excess C02 output might cause another unacceptable increase in global temperatures.
Not only is the atmosphere warming, it seems wind power businesses are getting a little hot under the collar: http://www.flatheadbeacon.com/articles/article/bpa_orders_nw_wind_farms_to_curtail_production/27749/
So they get a federal tax credit and are paid whether they produce power or not. No way for customers to escape the higher costs.
Mr. Connelley: In a manner quite similar to the Laws of Thermodymanics, the net flow of insults always flows AWAY from the loser. Take heed!
My computer sends me a message from the Unix/Linux “fortune” program every day. Today’s:
Tact:
The unsaid part of what you’re thinking.
davidmhoffer said:
“Suppose you have a lot that is 1000 square meters. You build a building upon it that covers exactly half the lot. What is the surface area that can “see” the sky?”
WMC’s argument is not hard to understand; just because you don’t like him doesn’t mean you should act dense when responding to him. If I have a rectangular lot and I build a building on half of it, half of the lot becomes roof and can see the whole sky; the other half of the lot only sees about half the sky that it did before. If instead I build my building around the edges of the lot with a courtyard in the middle, the courtyard loses almost its entire view of the sky. I don’t have any idea what the magnitude of the resulting effect is, but you shouldn’t act superior to someone if you don’t even understand the point he’s making.
lookupitseasy,
I understood what davidmhoffer was saying. Sorry you didn’t. Hoffer’s building is one mm high. Your building is eight hundred feet high. Either way, what the ground doesn’t see, the roof does. You’re looking straight up either way.
Anyway, referring to WMC is like appealing to the pseudo-science ‘authority’ of Bill Nye the Science Guy.
Smokey, looks like you don’t have a clue, either, unfortunately. A photon emitted from the ground heads up at some angle. If it heads straight up, it maybe escapes the atmosphere relatively quickly. If it heads off at an angle and there are no tall things around, ditto. Now put a tall building next to it; if it heads off in the direction of the building, it necessarily doesn’t escape the atmosphere before running in to something (namely, the building). Thus, the building increases the average amount of time a photon takes to escape. This is a very simple idea. I have no idea if it actually explains UHI (which is WMC’s claim), but evidently neither you nor davidmhoffer can be troubled to understand what the claim is before deciding it must be wrong.
Really, you should go re-read davidmhoffer’s post from which I quoted. It’s abundantly clear that he doesn’t have a clue what he’s talking about: the question he asks is what portion of the ground can see the sky. The answer is, if you build large buildings, then much less of it can (on average). This is a simple fact of geometry: if you’re on a convex surface and you look above a tangent plane, you can’t see the surface. But if you add texture to your surface, you block lots of lines of sight.
(Note also that this doesn’t involve an appeal to anyone’s authority, it involves an appeal to spending 5 minutes actually thinking about the claims you’re making instead of instinctively lashing out.)